Moving a rack - remove servers first?

[SteveTheGeek]

I'm going to be moving a half-dozen racks each at least half-full of UPSs, servers, etc in a few weeks. I'd heard several years ago that one should remove everything from a rack before moving it anywhere, and I'm figuring on doing that, but comments/opinions from anyone here would be appreciated.
-Steve

 

[MJewell]

Probably not a bad idea, although depends on how far your moving it, just make sure you push the rack from as low on the rack as possible to avoid tipping... I usually try not to push it from anywhere higher then 1-1.5' from the ground... Also make sure you always have the heavy stuff on the bottom...

Mike

 

[MJewell]

If your heavy stuff isn't allready on the bottom, then may as well remove and reorganize it while your moving it anyway....

Mike

 

[MrTom]

definately remove everything! i pushed a rack down a cable hole once and that was scary enough and it was only tilted a few degrees over (i wasn't even trying to move it).
sounds like a good way to waste a weeks work anyway

 

[NickFerrar]

Safest is certainly to strip it down first. Personally though when I had to move a rack I just cranked it back up on it's wheels and carefully pushed it to where I wanted it - the biggest hassle was keeping the cable spaghetti coming out of the back of the rack from getting in the way.

 

[SteveTheGeek]

Thanks for the advice... These racks aren't on wheels, so I'll be pulling the servers and (depending on the number of helping hands) the UPSes as well.
-Steve

 

[johnny99]

Like MJewell said, use the downtime you have to reorganize.
You will never get this chance again.

One thing we did 2 years ago was to remove all UPS's and stop using them.
We now have on central UPS for all servers, SAN, library, tapedrives, routers and light. You can't even plug a server into power without it being on the UPS.
This solutions sounds like it cost a lot, but when I started to calculate one everything it was a realy good investment. We had to renovate power anyway because it was outdated.
/johnny

 

[MJewell]

Wish we had that here Johnny, brand new building and we don't have the server room on the backup generator... but it doesn't hurt to have the UPS's anyway, my switches are on redundent power and I still have them on 2200RM's more to be used as a giant line conditioner....

Mike