When a company gets taken over, things really changed. I spend the whole of Friday night supervising the moving of a customer’s servers to a central datacenter of the new mother company. It went very smoothly, thanks to a very well oiled team. This is the third moving project in two months.
By the time we finished racking up the servers, it was the wee hours of Saturday morning. Two of the servers have strange problems. All the LEDs were on and flashing but nobody home. Using direct console, showed no display and keyboard not responsive. The servers were most probably still stuck in the boot-up phase. Time to escalate to the vendor.
By the time the service engineer got the server coupled together with wrong parts delivered, it was lunchtime on Saturday. I had altogether of 1-hour sleep, snatched in between phases.
All this could have taken at least another three hours more if we had to pull out the hard disks as planned. The customer at the last minute decided not to. Pulling out the hard disks is supposedly be better for the actual transport. But there may be RAID configuration or boot up problems when the disks were reinserted.
Moving the servers with the disks in place, you stand the risk of hard disk failure/s when the server goes through the bumps.