During the next week we tweaked our plan for the big move and finalized our schedule. Scheduling is tricky. With 3 feet between cabinets, only one person can fit comfortably, so when scheduling the server racking you can't have two teams in the same area or they get in each other's way, but cabling doesn't require as much moving back and forth so teams can work side by side with no issues. We took each cabinet and the number of servers in each one, laid it on a map and then calculated how much time each step would take (10 minutes to rack, 15 to run power cables, 15 to run network cables) and designed the plan that way.
Luckily our timing was pretty close and the install went off with no major issues. Oh, we had the occasional, "Where are the rails for this server", or broken cables, but no major issues.
Sunday was our test day and we started at 8:00 a.m. Things were going well until one of the administrators came running up the stairs. "The power company just called. There is a power problem in the park and they need to take power down to resolve it." Thirty seconds came and went as we waited for him to start laughing. He didn't.
Luckily, the power problem was not related to anything we did but rather the high winds of the night before. They took power down and our UPS and generators kicked in and we kept on testing, but I'm sure we all lost at least a month of our lives when we thought we had done something to cause power to fail.
At the end of a stressful project like this it is always good to relax over dinner and drinks and congratulate yourselves on a job well done. We did, and were having a good time until I said "Next time we should do it in 20 days." I thought I was going to get hung.
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