A data centre migration in London where the rack rebuild was the real project
A long-standing nesevo customer modernized its Barcelona offices, and we took on the whole office rollout as a single integrator, from sourcing the hardware to commissioning the last room. The result is a modern hybrid-work environment with 25 meeting rooms and more than 200 workstations, delivered by 12 nesevo technicians in four days.
The challenge
The bank’s existing racks couldn’t take the servers. The space was there, but the way the equipment was arranged and cabled left no usable, contiguous room for the incoming machines. You can’t land servers in a space that isn’t ready for them. So the reconfiguration wasn’t preparation for the project. It was the project.
The project at a glance
- 2 data centres in London
- 10 racks reconfigured at each site
- 120 servers brought back in-house, 60 per site
- Weekend work over several weeks, outside trading hours
- No downtime during trading hours
What nesevo did
- Reviewed the layout and scoped the work. We looked at how the racks were populated and cabled, and what had to change to free up usable space. Then we scoped the reconfiguration together with the bank.
- Reconfigured the racks and the cabling. Our team carried out the rebuild: rack layout, cabling and all preparation work. The result was simple, and the whole project depended on it: space, set up correctly, ready to receive the servers.
- Brought the servers in, in phases. Instead of a single cutover, the servers came back in tranches, week by week. Each tranche was installed and commissioned before the next one followed. The bank never had to bet its estate on one weekend.
- Set up the new connectivity. We worked alongside the bank and its third-party providers to set up the connectivity the in-house estate needed.
Two improvements nobody asked for
A rebuild is a rare chance to fix what’s already wrong. Two things came out of this one:
- Better resilience. Equipment that had been concentrated in single cabinets is now spread across racks. Losing one cabinet no longer means losing the service it carried.
- Cleaner cabling. Instead of putting the cabling back as it was, we reviewed and reworked it.
Neither was in the original brief. Both left the estate in better shape than before.
Data centre work across the UK
nesevo works across the whole of the UK, with particularly fast response times in London and the South East. Find out more about our data centre relocation services, or read how we delivered fully integrated racks to a UK customer.
