shipping pre-built cabinets vs. build-on-site

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1

Hi all,

Anybody here have experience shipping pre-built cabinets, with ~20U of routers and servers installed, connected and tested, to remote sites for deployment?

The idea is to increase the consistency of the deployments by having them all built in one place by the same set of people, and to reduce the amount of time required by warm bodies on-site (bodies that would otherwise have to receive individual components and install/cable them).

We've located a few vendors who sell shock-tolerant cabinets, but they're expensive and seem to me to be aimed at people who need to ship a set of equipment frequently (e.g. to support movie shoots, outside broadcasts, etc), rather than people who want to ship just once.

The destination in all cases would be a commercial, modern data centre. The equipment would be shipped from LA.

Do I even need to spend time wondering about shock-tolerant cabinets, or should I instead be concentrating on finding the right company to wrap the cabinets for shipping, and to do the shipping itself?

Joe

2

Joe asked today:
" Do I even need to spend time wondering about shock-tolerant cabinets,
or should I instead be concentrating on finding the right company to
wrap the cabinets for shipping, and to do the shipping itself?"

  Joe, after having done a lot of this I found it was very expensive
to find shock proof cabinets and a good air freight shipper. Any shipper of
electronic goods will understand the requirements needed to protect their
(your) cargo. It is costly for them to have damages occur in shipping which
is why a good company will go the extra mile. Cushioned pallet wraps,
additional padding and so forth come with the service you purchase.
  For my company, the bottom line was that it seemed redundant to pay
for insurance, which is a must and have the racks built into shockproof
cabinets. The cabinets were not needed at the data centers, so we called it
overkill and have never had any problems with the company we used.
  Your stuff is departing from LAX I would imagine. If you need a
recommendation or just some names so you can look for yourself, please feel
free to contact me off list. I hope this helps everyone a bit.
  Sincerely, Richard Golodner

3

Probably be cheaper to get shock-tolerant packing crates and use normal
  cabinets. You'll probably learn a few hard lessons the first time around
  -- should have put in styrofoam wedges between servers, or the rackmounts
  you used didn't hold up to shipping, or your shipper isn't as careful as
  they said they'd be -- but with the right packing crates and shipping
  partner, it's doable.

  Plus the crates can be re-used, lowering your costs.

Beckman

4

Anybody here have experience shipping pre-built cabinets, with ~20U of
routers and servers installed, connected and tested, to remote sites
for deployment?

[snip]

Do I even need to spend time wondering about shock-tolerant cabinets,
or should I instead be concentrating on finding the right company to
wrap the cabinets for shipping, and to do the shipping itself?

Read up on the way EMC ships drive arrays already preloaded into their 42U
cabinets. The cabinets are bolted to steel frames on special heavy duty
pallets; there is an overwrap of cardboard; and, most importantly, on the side
of the overwrap there is a tilt sensor that shows if the cabinet has been over
a certain angle from vertical. A cap over the overwrap keeps it all together,
and everything is banded as well.

EMC cabinets are not shock mounted.

EMC shipments are also handled by dedicated two-man teams with one particular
logistics company; they aren't shipped Fedex or UPS Freight.

For frequently shipped items, the shock mounted racks (using coiled cable,
typically) work very well, but they are not cheap.

5

Anybody here have experience shipping pre-built cabinets, with ~20U of routers and servers installed, connected and tested, to remote sites for deployment?

The idea is to increase the consistency of the deployments by having them all built in one place by the same set of people, and to reduce the amount of time required by warm bodies on-site (bodies that would otherwise have to receive individual components and install/cable them).

The issue you might run into is dealing with pre-racked components that end up getting damaged in transit. I've seen shippers do creative things with forklifts and pallet jacks :frowning:

On the flip side, telcos often do this. I know Verizon builds (or at least they did for a long time) racks and cabinets for deployment at customer deployment a central facility, then ships the finished product for installation. In this area (Pittsburgh, PA), the cabinets were built and tested at a Verizon assembly facility in Martinsburg, WV.

If you do move ahead with this and do use 4-post cabinets, make sure most of the devices can be secured to both the front and rear posts. That wouldn't apply to things like patch panels, but 1U servers and 1U network devices are often somewhat lacking in terms of sturdy mounting harrdware that's designed to accommodate the rigors of shipping.

As for shippers, I don't know if I would trust something as valuable or fragile to a regular LTL freight carrier. You might want to look at someone like FedEx Custom Critical. In my previous life, customers would ship their gear to our data center using them. Not cheap by any stretch... Also, if the source or destination does not have a real loading dock, your shipments will likely be more expensive if the shipper has to use a lift-gate truck.

We've located a few vendors who sell shock-tolerant cabinets, but they're expensive and seem to me to be aimed at people who need to ship a set of equipment frequently (e.g. to support movie shoots, outside broadcasts, etc), rather than people who want to ship just once.

Right. Companies like Calzone Cases, Jan-Al, Penn Fabrication and Hardigg
can build cabinets for this purposes but they are designed for stuff that lives 'on the road', such as touring sound equipment.

Do I even need to spend time wondering about shock-tolerant cabinets, or should I instead be concentrating on finding the right company to wrap the cabinets for shipping, and to do the shipping itself?

There are shock-mount pallets and shipping frames that can be used - they often bolt to the bottom of the cabinet and then there is often a 'bumper' for the top of the cabinet and then the whole works is shrink-wrapped together.

jms

6

In a message written on Mon, Apr 06, 2009 at 02:46:35PM -0400, Joe Abley wrote:

Anybody here have experience shipping pre-built cabinets, with ~20U of
routers and servers installed, connected and tested, to remote sites
for deployment?

"shipping", no, "moving" yes.

In past lives I've hired the same good folks who you might use to
move your house to move entire racks. The major moving companies
have teams who have experience with eletronic equipment, including
full racks. Any quality 4 post rack with things well secured should
be able to travel this way.

I've never tried out of range of a truck, in all of my examples it
was put on a truck, driven to the destination, and unloaded by the
same team of folks. Still, if you don't need it overnight that can be
the entire united states...

7

How tall are the doors in the destination datacenter?

How much weight can be rolled over the raised floor?

How high up are the cable trays in the aisles?

Etc., etc.

Sometimes things which are not obvious, and not about technology, are still important.

8

I know some VAR's (CDW for example) will do racking/shipping from their
facility. In the option we explored, they offered to allow us to rack gear
ourselves or rack it themselves. They also were amenable to a VPN setup so
we could get in via console and KVM's.
They claimed to ship pre-built cabinets like this on a regular basis.

9

I have some experience with this, and, in general, if you have the option,
it's best to ship the equipment and racks separately in their original
manufacturer's packaging.

If you don't have that option, use a moving company with a specialty
(or specialty department) that does electronics moving.

If you have to ship a rack this way, try to order the rack so that the
equipment with the greatest moment(1) from the center of the
cabinet is in the lowest positions and the equipment with the least
moment is at or near the top of the stack. Place all of the equipment
as low as possible in the rack.

Additionally, if there is anything with removable disk drives in the
rack, you are far better off to remove the drives and carefully pack
and ship them separately. Obviously, appropriate labeling is
crucial here if the drives already contain data.

Owen

(1)moment is the length (from the center of the rack) to the center
  of mass of the object multiplied by the mass of the object.

10

Joe Abley wrote:

Hi all,

Anybody here have experience shipping pre-built cabinets, with ~20U of routers and servers installed, connected and tested, to remote sites for deployment?

Not pre built cabinets, but I have shipped/received over $1,000,000.00 worth of gear (routers/switches/desktops/servers) all over the United States utilizing FedEx.

Packed everything with lots and lots of foam peanuts and shrink wrap, with standard pallets and crates. Never had an issue.

Checkout FedEx Custom Critical.... pricey but excellent (used them to ship something same day once..... that was really expensive as it required a dedicated aircraft.... but when you gotta have it as close to right now as possible, they fit the ticket). :slight_smile:

11

Probably be cheaper to get shock-tolerant packing crates and use normal

    > cabinets. You'll probably learn a few hard lessons the first time around
    > -- should have put in styrofoam wedges between servers, or the rackmounts
    > you used didn't hold up to shipping, or your shipper isn't as careful as
    > they said they'd be -- but with the right packing crates and shipping
    > partner, it's doable.

That's good advice. I've found that it's critially necessary to close the
loop by having the same person open the crate on the receiving end as
packed the gear on the shipping end, and have it be that person whose week
is wasted in transit or has to spend it scrounging parts in Lagos. Once
they learn a set of techniques that work, you can stop flying them around,
but hang on to them.

One of the best employees we ever had at this had grown up on a
family-owned winery, and had been shipping cases of wine internationally
since she was ten years old. Knew both the packing and customs ends of
things.

That's an important thing to remember... Your initial packing job will
only get you 80% of the way there. Some customs monkey will often unpack
it for you in his attempt to get good enough photos to post to eBay, but
you'll still have to get the crate the remaining 20% of the way to its
ultimate destination, though that'll be domestic truck freight within the
country.

    > Plus the crates can be re-used, lowering your costs.

Only if the cost of shipping the crates home again is lower than the cost
of building new ones, which is unlikely, even if you slow-boat them.

                                -Bill

12

Owen DeLong wrote:

(1)moment is the length (from the center of the rack) to the center
    of mass of the object multiplied by the mass of the object.

If you change the datum to the bottom of the rack, the CG calculation is easier.

Just remember that 6lbs/gallon for 100LL is close enough.

Matthew Kaufman

13

Hi all,

Anybody here have experience shipping pre-built cabinets, with ~20U of
routers and servers installed, connected and tested, to remote sites for
deployment?

I've done this in the past and most recently evaluated it as an option to
reduce remote hands requirements for future Icelandic data centers. I prefer
the on-site build. There are a lot of gotchas. For example, cabinet heights.
Floor loading. Max ceiling height, cable delivery systems, power delivery
preferences, cabinet style, etc. In most cabinet inventory facilities the
operators ask you to utilize their cabinets which, for some, are turned to
cooling and service delivery requirements. Entrance doorways are typically
wide, but a 7" cabinet on wheels will usually have to come in on it's side
if it's not built or already installed inside the room. Pre-fab cabinets may
have to be tipped, twisted, or mangled to get through a door. Depending upon
how your gear is mounted internally, you could see your backplanes
experience stresses that will not be obviously detectable "initially" as a
result of that jousting.

Pre fab for 20U in your own cabinet is also doubling the cost of your
install in a facility that would sell you 20U of cabinet. That doesn't leave
you much room for growth, but if you do your agreements in a manner that
allows you to expand and pay as you grow, it may be worth it not to pre fab
and eat all 40U in costs. These days, with the limited power available in
facilities, you may only get 20U and your growth sideways will require
additional cabinets anyhow so growing into your cabinet may not be possible.

The idea is to increase the consistency of the deployments by having them

all built in one place by the same set of people, and to reduce the amount
of time required by warm bodies on-site (bodies that would otherwise have to
receive individual components and install/cable them).

We've located a few vendors who sell shock-tolerant cabinets, but they're
expensive and seem to me to be aimed at people who need to ship a set of
equipment frequently (e.g. to support movie shoots, outside broadcasts,
etc), rather than people who want to ship just once.

The destination in all cases would be a commercial, modern data centre. The
equipment would be shipped from LA.

Do I even need to spend time wondering about shock-tolerant cabinets, or
should I instead be concentrating on finding the right company to wrap the
cabinets for shipping, and to do the shipping itself?

I wasn't able to show a major capex or opex cost savings by pre-fabricating.
You are either going to increase the workload of your existing people or
hire more to buy the obvious convenience. Either way, probably more
expensive for 20U that it may be worth.

1. as-builts designated by the RU
2. physical layer wiring diagram
3. cable run list (optical, fiber, connector type, pots)
4. Bill of materials down to the rack mount kit screws
5. cut view, detailing cabinet details _from the datacenter_.

I think that you'll find that you can improve your install experience by
(possibly) improving your documentation and standards requirements.

Best,

Marty

14

martin@theicelandguy.com (Martin Hannigan) wrote:

1. as-builts designated by the RU
2. physical layer wiring diagram
3. cable run list (optical, fiber, connector type, pots)
4. Bill of materials down to the rack mount kit screws
5. cut view, detailing cabinet details _from the datacenter_.

:wink:

We have quite some experience in having third party people, including
professional hosting companies and "friends" on-site, receiving our
boxes and assembling the entire thing for us. The only ones that failed
were a big german teclo back in 2004. Which was essentially why we
why we assembled an entire cabinet ready-for-production, in the 2006
rebuild for their new datacenter site. Yes, we got it shipped within
Germany (Frankfurt to Ulm). Getting a shipping company to do that
difficult at best: The big ones all turned us down. We found a small
company that did it (who usually worked for one of the big ones that
turned us down). They claimed to have experience, and they delivered
everything in working condition. The telco was eventually able to
plug the five cables into the right sockets and everything was ready
to jumpstart.

Usually we send parts, and what has proven a very good idea for us is
to ship really everything, including every cable, connector and adaptor,
except for the mains connectors which are different in every single
place. It is crucial to label every port (and I mean "server ports"
and "strange boxes' ports"; everything but switchports, really) with
a number and do the same with every single cable and adaptor.

A detailled cabling plan which lists and sometimes depicts what goes
where (A- and B-side systems, cable numbers, lengths and colors, and
the according port numbers) makes cabling the thing - as I've been
told - pretty easy.

Well, soon enough I'll be doing the first ever on-site installation
myself which comes with a nice couple of days vacation, so I opted
for doing it. Of course, it's actually just the verification of our
assembly instructions being _really_ idiot-proof.

Anyway, Joe, if you can make it happen, have people on-site assemble
the stuff for you. They will usually be kind enough to make power
cables for you, too. I have had people from professional hosters
really go out of their way (using private credit cards to obtain
parts etc) to make the thing work.

Sending that one full rack has proven successful for us, but that
was specialists with some experience, and it was road only. Every
time I see suitcases being thrown around in airports...well...

Elmar.

15

> 1. as-builts designated by the RU
> 2. physical layer wiring diagram
> 3. cable run list (optical, fiber, connector type, pots)
> 4. Bill of materials down to the rack mount kit screws
> 5. cut view, detailing cabinet details _from the datacenter_.

[ clip ]

Usually we send parts, and what has proven a very good idea for us is
to ship really everything, including every cable, connector and adaptor,
except for the mains connectors which are different in every single
place. It is crucial to label every port (and I mean "server ports"
and "strange boxes' ports"; everything but switchports, really) with
a number and do the same with every single cable and adaptor.

I forgot the piece of documentation that I use for that specifically; the
boxology diagram. That's a visio[1] detail related to chassis and card slots
that correlate directly to the bill of materials for inventory and install
management. I tend to drop ship the entire order to the facility instead of
shipping and then reshipping to save on the shipping costs. This is a
prefernce thing since the costs for 20U and shipping are probably not that
great as compared to doing this for 200 racks.

One other thing that is important for documentation. Pics of the completed
install. I won't release payment until there is an acceptance, either onsite
or via pics and an operational service.

Best,

Martin

1. Most vendors have visio objects to give you upon the asking. Visio itself
comes with many, and there are vendors like NetZoom who make a living
providing chassis and card objects for this level of detail.

16

<snip>

Sending that one full rack has proven successful for us, but that
was specialists with some experience, and it was road only. Every
time I see suitcases being thrown around in airports...well...

Baggage handlers have nothing on FedEX folks. They literally hurl packages into the truck like baseballs. I used to work for a major fullfillment company, and one afternoon we were in the IT office and we got to see first hand how FedEX loaded up the items they were shipping from one of our West Coast facilities. :slight_smile:

Of course our packing / prep took this into account and so the items survived.

17

Leo Bicknell <bicknell@ufp.org> writes:

"shipping", no, "moving" yes.

In past lives I've hired the same good folks who you might use to
move your house to move entire racks. The major moving companies
have teams who have experience with eletronic equipment, including
full racks. Any quality 4 post rack with things well secured should
be able to travel this way.

That's the way that IBM used to ship mainframes out of their Kingston,
NY facility years ago. Never seen so many United Van Lines trucks in
one place.

The divisions of moving companies that handle trade shows are usually
the same divisions that handle "high tech" moves. I've used United
and Bekins, but in both cases that was so long ago that my positive
experience with them at the time doesn't count either way for present
day.

-r