Technology infrastructure provider Align has expedited telecom company Verizon’s data centre migration to meet their looming lease termination.
Verizon had sold their data centre in Waltham, Massachusetts. This required Verizon to migrate over 1,200 devices to their new primary data centre located in Boston within an expedited timeline of 4–5 months, due to pending lease termination. The size, scope and strict timeline of the project required expertise focused on migration planning and project management.
Migration efforts
Having successfully completed a similar move for a Verizon data centre in 2019, Align was best suited to take over the migration efforts and was awarded the project. The source facility consisted of twelve data centres that were each dedicated critical testing labs for various 5G shield rooms and broadcasting environments.
As a result, Align worked with the individual owners of each data centre to obtain accurate device inventory status and validation, patch cable requirements and scheduling, and migration planning. Once this information was collected, Align and Verizon were able to establish project governance guidelines and organize communication schedules within the master migration plan.
Align successfully moved 1,134 devices out of the Waltham facility and into the new data centre in 11 migration waves over a compressed four-month timeline. This included 250 network devices, 300 servers, and 650 hardware assets—from laptops to routers, sub-racks, disk arrays, appliances, various 5G radios, 5G antennas, and more.
The old facility was decommissioned in record time with minimal downtime and risk to the business. Verizon is now operating at full capacity in their new Boston data centre facility.
