First Pod Move from Oakland to Sacramento (3/26/2013)

On Tuesday, 3/26/2013 the datacenter team moved the first "trial move" of 18 pods from the Oakland datacenter (Digital Realty Trust) to Sacramento (Sungard).  Below are some pictures from the day.   The first picture was taken at 7:15am as Dave and Ben typed commands to get ready to shut down the pods and move them.  All the pictures on this page are in Oakland.

Dave and Ken first power down all the pods in the racks before doing anything else.

Next Dave and Ken unplug every power cord and ethernet patch cable from the pods.  This picture was taken at 7:31am.

Dave and Ken use Guido the robot lift to unrack (de-rack?) 18 pods.  Ben follow them unbolting rails to be taken with the move.  Ken and Dave muscle one pod into the top of the plastic cart, and one pod into the bottom of the plastic cart.  We have 9 carts for 18 pods.

We put "ShockWatch" impact detection sensors on the pods just to track whether they are dropped or jostled too much during the move.

Here is another ShockWatch sensor that measures different G ranges:

From left to right: Tim Nufire, Ben Cannon. Ben Villatore (facing away in glasses), Ken Manjang (black T-shirt and shorts), and Dave Stallard (blue shirt and jeans).  You can see the pods are packed with a piece of foam on each side and strapped to the wheeled carts.

Ken and Dave strapping the red Backblaze pods onto wheeled carts for the move.

Here it is 9:23am and all the carts are ready and loaded but still in their original "room" in the Oakland datacenter, the next part is to wheel them down to the large truck waiting in the loading dock.

Here is the Oakland loading dock.  The pods are brought down here.

Four pods at a time are loaded into the truck (two carts).  Since we have about 450 pods total at this point, this is about 1 percent of the pod fleet on that hydraulic lift.  We think Backblaze can survive the loss of up to 4 pods during this move and still stay in business (by issuing a repush command immediately to all the clients with data on the 4 damaged pods).

Here are the 9 carts holding 18 pods fully strapped down in the truck at 10:25am.  This system of strapping them to the walls of the truck would max out at 24 pods in one move.  Theoretically you could put a center row in to move more pods at once, but it is unclear how to secure them.

Final picture with the guys who did this half of the move.  In the lower left of the picture below you can see an all black plastic box, that contains the rails for the pods.  No power cords or ethernet patch cables are taken to the other datacenter to help speed up the move.

All done!

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