The Data Centre Relocation Handbook: Discovery, design, cutover, handback

A data centre move is a coordination problem with technical content. This book treats it that way.Moving a data centre from one building to another is not a design exercise. The hard parts are almost never the ones that end up in a design document. They are the lead time on a circuit, the cabinet that does not fit through the door, the application owner on holiday during the freeze, and the server that has been running for nine years and has never once been rebooted.The Data Centre Relocation Handbook follows the shape of a real project, from the first uncomfortable meeting to the last handback certificate. It is written by an infrastructure architect who has moved data centres, and most of it comes from the moves that did not go well.What the book coversPart I, Before you commit: why sites move, the ten ways relocations go wrong, and how to write a feasibility study that tells the business what it is actually being promised.Part II, Discovery: the estate, the network at layers one to three, carriers and third parties, and dependency mapping. Why the numbers you are given are wrong, which way they are wrong, and how to check without making enemies.Part III, Decisions and design: downtime, risk and who signs. Choosing a migration strategy. Selecting and designing the target site. Getting circuits delivered. Consolidating before you move so that you carry less.Part IV, Buying and preparing: procurement, logistics, transport and insurance, and the schedule with its reserve, its change freeze and its go or no-go gate.Part V, Execution: the full shutdown rehearsal, the cutover runbook, the move weekend itself, validation and hypercare, and handing back the old site properly.What you can take and reuseEvery chapter ends with a checklist of what has to be true before you leave that phase. The book also contains the feasibility study structure, the device inventory and connection list fields, the circuit register, the carrier question set, the dependency map template, the lift and shift request, the runbook skeleton, the validation checklist, and the complete 147 row work breakdown structure from a real relocation, printed in full so you can copy it into your own tool.Who it is forInfrastructure leads who know the estate better than anyone and are assumed to know all of it. Project managers who need a plan with dates and owners. Architects who have to defend the target site design. And the person who signs the risk register and may not have asked for the job.It is not vendor specific, it is not a guarantee that nothing will break, and it is not a brochure. It is the book the author wanted somebody to hand him before his first move.