Complex Colocation move simplified - Going above and beyond

Going "above and beyond" for customers is something that almost any company will say they are willing to do. Whether they sell coffee, tickets to the zoo, or private cloud environments. It's a staple of a good business that they are willing to provide their customers with the best experiences possible. However, there's usually a line drawn somewhere. “We'll only deliver this far.” or “We're only willing to work this long; we can only call you so many times."

Generally, it's not considered a fault of the company. It's become an accepted trope that, while they say they will always go above and beyond, they just to have provide good service.

Wowrack doesn't aim to only provide good service.

Customer's environment within their space being prepped for the move. Wowrack assisted with moving critical cabinets while other cabinets were emptied and moved.

At Wowrack we also say that we are willing to go above and beyond to deliver the perfect customer experience all the time, but we also want to deliver on that promise. For one of our customers, they wanted to put this to the test.

This customer has a complex private cloud ecosystem which they were hosting themselves and managing. They were looking to obtain colocation services with Wowrack, and move 3 of their cabinets as-is. The goal was to move entire cabinets from their previous data center in another floor of the building to our data center.

But this was no ordinary move

In general, moving from one floor of a building to another is a easy task. Even when moving servers, it's usually as straightforward as unplugging cables, removing the servers from their racks, and moving it piece-by-piece to another location. Then you do the same stuff you've already done again - but in reverse. However, with the customers hyper-customized environment, they were worried about down-time and they were worried about the precise way that their equipment was set up.

So we had to put our money where our mouth is.

Moving cabinets with servers using stairs is impossible.

The thing is, their previous data center is actually plagued with steps with no ramp.

So we had to completely create, from scratch, a series of ramps to make this possible. There were no shortcuts taken; we designed and built a ramp that could rise to this challenge. Then we had to plot our ideal down-time with them, which was after hours on a Saturday. We readied our staff, and planned the move in great detail.

We finally were able to move the three 1500lb cabinets and get them situated into their new home, humming along beautifully.

The entire move was comlpeted within one day and because we spent so long on planning, development, and staging, by the time we got to the implementation, it felt like we had done it a thousand times and we were very confidant.

The Wowrack Difference

This may have been an easy opportunity for some companies that laud their ability to go above-and-beyond to stop going above and beyond. For Wowrack

Customer's environment secured within Wowrack's data center

however, this is what embodies going above and beyond. It would have been simple for us to tell them "that's too far, we can't move it with the stairs" or even just "no. not that way." But we didn't. And we wouldn't. The idea of doing whatever our customer's need is always a part of our everyday work life.

Wowrack is a cloud solutions provider who offers a mulititude of infrastructure services such as hybrid cloud, private cloud, colocation, disaster recovery, backups and more – and optionally managing any of these services on our customers behalf.