CAY: Weekend Migration from Legacy Server Room to Compliant Facility

Client background

• In 2019Q4, CAY expanded office operations and needed to move into a new site.
• The old room was an improvised rack area with tangled wiring and desktop UPS units, with daytime temperature around 43C and nighttime around 35C.
• Before migration, WalksCloud had already stabilized server-farm and network baselines; this phase focused on room, power, and environmental compliance.

Initial situation and pain points

1. Harsh thermal conditions: poor airflow and no hot/cold aisle design exposed equipment to sustained high temperature.
2. Disordered power design: desktop UPS sprawl, no dual-path feed model, and no bypass switch for safe maintenance.
3. Budget and space compression: the COO reduced the new room footprint and downgraded cooling specification, forcing redesign under constraints.

Core challenges

• Complete migration in one weekend shutdown without delaying Monday operations.
• Fit one network/patch cabinet, three connected server cabinets, and one loose mixed cabinet into reduced space.
• Deliver dual-path UPS with bypass capability and leave room for growth.
• Keep temperature within safe operation range despite constrained HVAC.

WalksCloud solution and execution

1. Weekend move with color-coded cabling

• Shut down Friday night, moved stacked legacy equipment into the new room, and reracked by function and load plan.
• Used pre-labeled three-color cabling from the facility vendor: green for office network, red for research internal network (allowlist), and gray for SIP.
• Because server-farm structure had been pre-stabilized, the new room activation focused on rack placement and reconnection, not full reconfiguration.

2. UPS and environment controls

• Implemented dual 6KVA UPS per server cabinet with bypass switches through professional power contractors, and split dual PSU feeds across separate UPS paths for maintenance continuity.
• Even without approval for a larger room or higher-spec HVAC, kept UPS expansion margin and ensured the power-circuit plan remained compliant.
• Activated existing environmental probes and IoT telemetry for immediate post-move monitoring of temperature, humidity, and power state.

Outcomes

• Downtime limited to one working day: migration completed over weekend and operations resumed Monday.
• Temperature improvement: room temperature stayed below 30C after migration.
• Power stability improved: dual-path UPS plus bypass model reduced maintenance interruption risk, with power and environment indicators monitored through IoT plus Grafana.
• Scalable under constraints: despite reduced footprint, three-color cabling and UPS reservation kept future expansion viable.