Open Monday morning with everything working

The first visit is to the new space with the floor plan in hand. We work out where the communications room will be and whether it has the power, the ventilation and the physical security to be one, a closet with no airflow in an Arizona building is a server failure scheduled for July. We count the data drops each desk actually needs, map where wireless access points should go given the wall construction, check where the building's service entrance is and what conduit exists, and look for the problems that are cheap to fix now and expensive to fix later: no dedicated circuit for the rack, no path for cable between floors, a demarcation point on the wrong side of the building.

Circuits are the long pole

Internet service is the item that will delay your move, and it is the one businesses start last. A new fiber circuit at a commercial address is regularly a matter of many weeks from order to live, sometimes considerably longer if construction is required to reach the building, and the provider's survey may not reveal that until well into the process. Coax and fixed wireless are faster to install but not always suitable as a primary service. We get the order placed as soon as the lease is signed, chase the provider through the survey and scheduling stages, and get the circuit installed and tested well before move weekend.

The corresponding discipline is not canceling the old circuit too early. Overlap the services. Paying for two connections for a few weeks is a rounding error against a business that cannot process orders on its first Monday. We also plan for what happens if the new circuit is late, which sometimes means a temporary cellular failover so the office can operate while the provider finishes, and which is worth having anyway as ongoing redundancy.

Cabling, and moving the rack

Structured cabling goes in before furniture and after any building work, and it should be done properly the one time it is easy to do. That means Cat6 or Cat6A depending on your needs and horizon, plenum-rated cable where it runs through return air spaces because the fire code requires it, terminations onto a patch panel rather than loose cables into a switch, every run labeled at both ends against a schedule, and testing and certification for each drop. Untested cabling is where intermittent network faults come from, and they take longer to find later than the testing would have taken originally. Run more drops than you think you need while the ceiling is open, because the marginal cost per additional drop during installation is a fraction of adding one afterwards.

The rack itself is a documentation job before it is a physical one. Before anything is unplugged we photograph every side of the cabinet, label both ends of every cable, and produce a manifest of what connects where. Then equipment is shut down in the correct order, virtual machines quiesced, then guests, then hosts, then storage, then the network, with a verified backup taken immediately beforehand and, on anything critical, a second copy that leaves the building separately from the hardware. Equipment travels padded and upright, and drives that have run continuously for years occasionally do not come back up after being moved, which is precisely why the backup is verified first rather than assumed.

The cutover itself is a schedule, not an event, and most of it happens before the weekend. Public DNS record time-to-live values are lowered several days ahead so records propagate in minutes rather than hours when the address changes. Firewall configuration for the new circuit is built and staged in advance, including any site-to-site VPN tunnels that must be reconfigured for new public addressing. Anything published to the internet gets its new address planned and its certificate arrangements checked. Voice services are ported or reconfigured with the provider on a confirmed date, because number porting has its own lead time and its own capacity to ruin a Monday.

Then the physical weekend: equipment installed and racked, cabling patched and verified, wireless access points mounted and tuned to the new walls rather than left on defaults, printers and multifunction devices connected, addressed and tested from real workstations, and every desk brought up and checked with someone actually logging in. We work through a written checklist rather than by memory, because at eleven o'clock on a Sunday night memory is not what anyone should be relying on. Our network installation and wireless pages cover that side of the work in more detail.

Day one, we are there. Someone from your pod is onsite for the first morning, because the issues that surface are always small, numerous and urgent: a scanner that will not reach its destination folder, a label printer nobody mentioned, a user whose mapped drive points at the old server address, a conference room display with the wrong input. Being present turns a day of complaints into a morning of quick fixes. There is more on how we run these projects at officemove.orcait.io.

Order the circuit the day you sign the lease. Everything else can be compressed. That cannot.Orca IT, Gilbert AZ