Data Center Transformation at a Local Bank
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About the Client
Location
Modesto, CA
Industry
Finance
Number of Employees
250+
Main Outcomes
New Panduit racks
Reorganized cable
Wire management
The Problem
IT managers are very busy. They have to maintain complex environments that need constant attention. The business unit’s demand on employee growth puts pressure on managers to scale IT infrastructure quickly.
Add a switch here, a router there, extra servers, and the next thing you know, that clean data center or IT closet has become a jumbled mess of yellow, orange, and blue cables. No longer able to manage it, they surrender when they can’t make heads or tails of what is going where. We see this a lot.
This local bank had several racks in their data center with cables strung back and forth everywhere. If their data center was a restaurant, it would be the Spaghetti Factory.
This made it hard for the IT team to do their job, especially when time was of the essence. Accessing equipment in need of servicing and finding available switch ports became a challenge.
Additionally, IT auditors were recommending that the data center be reconfigured to raise the height of equipment to prevent potential flood damage.
The Challenge
The entire data center needed to be dismantled, new racks and wire management put into place, and all equipment reassembled in new locations.
Some of the existing cabling was not long enough reach the new location in the data center, so it needed to be re-pulled.
All of the cabling needed to be re-terminated into new patch panels in order to be dressed and organized properly. When finished, every cable would have to be patched back into the original switch port so the data center could come back to life without any additional downtime.
All of this created a significant amount of work to be completed under a tight timeframe with little room for error. And because the bank’s operations run Monday through Saturday, there was only a small window of available downtime.
The Solution
The bank knew that their problem would only get worse as they expanded and weren’t willing to allow the pain points to continue to exist.
We completed the project over a three-day weekend and all systems were brought back online and tested prior to users returning to work.
All cables were patched in with 100% accuracy, and the entire data center came back to life with zero issues resulting from the facelift.