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We are/maybe moving to a physical new location. I have a general idea of what is needed but as I’ve never done this before, I’m looking for tips from the community.

Company size of 30 or so people, handful of physical servers, and some networking equipment. I’m looking at having a 3rd party do the cabling to get that headache out of the way.

What, if you have gone through a move, did you do and what would you have done differently?

I don’t know if I should opt for wiring closets, if 4 drops per office is sufficient for future growth.

I’m opting for cat6 for the above reason

I have an ISP lined out

Server Room placement and IT office placement are in the works, but not set yet

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Always make sure you have extra room for growth beyond what you’re planning for, inevitably you will grow beyond what you planned for

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4 drops per office, depending on the size of the office and expected number of users should be OK. Make sure you build a reliable wireless system, that is the way things are going. You will need a wiring closet/server space no matter what even if you start a migration to cloud based systems which is also coming.

You have the chance to set the company up for the next 5-8 years, think in those terms and you should be OK.

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Having done hundreds of moves, the one thing that is a good idea is to get your network (WAN, Internet & LAN) ready and running at least 30 days prior to move-in such that you can address any equipment, NAT, firewall or other testing. This means there will be 30 days where you have to pay for two networks in parallel, and perhaps a week or two after move-in (in-case you have to temporarily back-out a service or two while a solution is figured out), but will be priceless in terms of reduced downtime, having a back-out plan and end-user frustration.

Never, ever, ever do a “hot-cut” otherwise you have no back-out plan and I have personally never seen them go smoothly. There is always something forgotten or “hidden” (i.e. learned someone is using a service we forgot about setting up such as remote desktop, for example).

This will also give you an opportunity to prepare and communicate to your end-users what to expect day 1 (file and print all works, internet too but maybe some custom apps via Internet may take some time to update DNS records, etc.).

Get all networking OSI layers working in the new office then start planning the migration of all applications. That’s my 2 cents!

The list is grand in a move. There are other great posts already here in terms of other aspects and hopefully you can develop a list.

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Don’t forget to get adequate power.

Raised floors?

Properly sized cooling for the servers.

Lastly, according to one of Murphy’s many laws, is the building at-risk for any kind of flooding?

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I suggest working closely with your cabling company. Make sure you have a map of the cable locations that are all clearly marked on both ends. Also, when in doubt, drop two more cables than you think you’ll need. You never know what kind of future growth or odd requests for equipment you’ll get in the future.

For a single floor building for 30 people, you probably do not need a wiring closet. Just bring all of those runs back to your rack and have a robust cable management system in place.

Make sure you know what kind of furniture is going in to each office so and how they want them laid out. You want to have easy access (if you can) to your wall jacks and power. Desks with full sized modesty panels against the wall are the bane of my existence here. Especially the giant U shaped desks. Make sure cable management for each office is reasonable for each desk so you do not have cables running across floors or across desks.

Know your power requirements as well. How many power outlets are accessible per office? Are they 2 gang? 4 gang? will you need to add a UPS that has more than 6 ports for each desk?

I’m sure I can come up with more if I think harder about it.

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Awesome suggestions… see, this is why I asked!

No flooding; the buildings we are looking at are both in towers, which could flood lower levels, but that isn’t my problem.

Good idea on overlaping ISPs

I need to think about having enough space in my area for at least one extra person (hopeful growth!)

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I can tell you some real nightmares about moving a company, but lessons learned are as follows:

  • Make sure the power is adequate for your serves
  • Make sure the AC works
  • Make sure that if there’s anything special you need (antennas and etc), that permits are in place to move them or are applied for.
  • Make sure all the cable drops work
  • Make sure you’ve pre-planned where everything being placed
  • Make sure that soft stuff (like the water and toilet) works.
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It sounds like you’re primarily wondering about cabling up the new office ahead of moving in. You mention planning a server room, and for a company that size I would think you would just run all of the wiring from there as well. I don’t think you would need a separate wiring closet.

Number of drops per office depends on two things: how many people you can imagine accommodating in each office (and maybe add one or two, in case growth demands really cramming people in for a while), and how many drops you image each person needing. Will you use IP phones? Will the computers be daisy-chained through the phones or on a separate drop? Does anyone need a second computer or other networked device? For each cluster of drops, I’d add at least one spare in case of a cable going bad.

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I’d have one person in an office, IP printers, IP phones (do have PC ports), PCs and DMZ drop

It’s a law firm, so more than one in an office is not going to happen

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Even if the phones have PC ports, I would still do a dedicated drop for the PC. Seen it before where a phone has an internal networking issue where the phone works but the speed to the computer is drastically reduced. 100mb line coming in and the user (CEO in this case) was only getting 7-10mb download and upload speeds. Replaced the phone with the same model and it jumped up to the 100mb he was supposed to be seeing. Also some phones can’t handle 1 GB connections, so that would be a bottleneck if you are running Cat 6.

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Having done my share of moves, I’d definitely get your ISP locked in with a date as soon as you can. Can be serious lead time with them, and I’ve had client moves where the service turn-up date has been pushed back several weeks for factors beyond our control.

Also, as absurd as it sounds, don’t discount flooding in a tower. I had a client on the 8th floor of a high-rise end up with a flooded server room. Tenant on the 9th floor had a pipe burst in their kitchen over the weekend, and that kitchen was above my client’s server room. Fortunately they had offsite backup, but their file server didn’t make it.

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This is more simple stuff, but make sure everything gets packed into properly labelled containers. We had the staff pack their stuff into heavyweight plastic containers which a moving company would take away, eventually they got lazy and started mixing boxes which makes fun times for wireless equipment.

If possible overbudget for any equipment needed, our cable drops were minimal for the floor layout so I had to buy a load of switches and power strips to wire up the new desks, and even then I came up short after planning it out.

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Most of what you need is covered. In my experience Lawyers like to reorganise regularly, so make sure you have adequate power and network points to allow for the movements of desks and people around the office. In the server room you might want UPS connected to a dedicated power supply with an isolation switch.

Just to re-emphasise. Get the comms in first as there will be inevitable supplier delay for lots of good reasons and the office won’t function without it.

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Moving seems like a great excuse to virtualize those physical servers, just get 2 new hosts with local storage and replicate them.

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Plan…

Get all the instructions from your authority

Keep your current network blueprint & All cabling blue print for future needs

Note down all the IP & Configuration settings

Have clearly documented file of current network infrastructure

New Place

Study the place

Re arange your network blue print for current location

Make sure all the devices are included to the new blue print

Let the thrird party complet the cabling part bsed on your new blue print

Let A/C technicians to check the A/C status of the server room

Start install hardwares

Start the configuration part and make sure to get informations from your ducmentations

Let the network operate for more than two weeks

find week points and monitor

find week points and monitor

again find week points and monitor

once all done let the users to involve with the network

Continue the week point finding task

:smiley:

Good Luck

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As others have said, get more power and network spots than you’ll ever want.

The company I worked for (I’m the only real ‘on site’ IT, and there’s another guy who handles more of the backbone stuff) moved about 3 months after I started, before I really did much IT work, and had any input.

We moved into a new office with a lot of space, and everything seemed to be solidly laid out. But, after getting here, and seeing where they had all of the desks, there was just a ton of headaches in the making, and as the company grew into other suites, those headaches continued in the new suites as well. Not enough power outlets, not enough data ports, and everything was too far away. We spent the past year constantly buying 20ft/30ft cables for the desks, and the real headache has become getting power to everything. We’ve spent so much time and money trying to track down 15ft+ power strips (Hard to track down, and super expensive when you do).

With the new office, I did everything I could to make sure we had more than enough power and data on every wall I could. The office designed for just the owner’s son? Don’t care. I assume it will have 3 people in it (His old office currently has 2) and planned around that.

As for the move itself, get lots of boxes, and lots of post-its and tape. It was easier for me to just get paper boxes big enough to hold the PC, keyboard and mouse, scanner, and monitor, then throw labels on everyone’s stuff and drop it off at their new desk once those were setup, and had power and cable run to them.

Good luck!

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Thanks for the tip but I’m 99% virtual, one physical server still exists which I’m working on replacing this year. Good for anyone not in that boat though!

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This is some great information, lots of things I didn’t think of.

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Whatever you budget is, plan to go over it. In my experience there are always unforeseen expenses that pop up, usually to the fact of IT being the last thing companies think about when looking for a new location.

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