Since Jason just posted a photo dump of pics, hopefully I can expand on the events of recent, with some new pics as well.

January 4th: Around 5pm
We begin the relocation by shutting all systems to be moved…and as a show of power, every desktop on the network.(We had a real reason, just some sensationalism)

After everything had been powered down as needed, naturally it was time for a break.

 Now on to the work. There were several reasons for our move. We were growing to big for our current space, our servers were just stacked on top of one another, our backup situation needed help, and it was in a remote part of the building.

After the taco bell settled we started disconnecting the servers and sorting the cables. I documented the process while Jason handed heavy things to Jim.

  As I mentioned before once we got the servers moved we had to sort out some cabling.

The move was on. When I said that our servers were stacked on top of each other there was a system of separating the physical boxes. Here is a shot of our previous rack system.

On to the Datacenter! We prepared for our move by putting the rails in the rack so we could get the servers in quickly. Here we are putting in the first server.

One server down, now its time for a break! We just happened to get a special visit from our favorite CFO Linda. She knew we would be working hard so she brought us some treats.

After that short interlude it was back to the servers. We happened to look at the server we just loaded and realized it wasn’t correct, so we did it again.

The rest of the move went pretty well. No large hurdles, a snag or two maybe. We were able to get everything up and running. We had a little pool between us as to what time we would finish. Jim had 10pm I had 12am and Jason had 2am. While there was some controversy involving certain parties ‘padding’ the time, our finish up time happened to be somewhere between 4 and 4:30 am making us all losers. Here are a few final pics of the move.

After some cleanup were were ready for the week. It’s been a long process, starting back in October, but it feels good to have it completed. Particularly because two days after our move, 35 Church IT guys from all over the country converged on Northwoods for Sharepoint Training.