Case Study: Data centre migration for city council.

  • Client: A large Scottish local authority (via its systems integration partner)
  • Scope: Full IT relocation (~185 devices, ~1,200 cables) from a legacy site in South Wales to a Tier III-certified data centre in Glasgow, plus decommissioning and secure disposal of 600+ legacy assets from the outgoing environment
  • Delivery: Single migration window, out-of-hours execution, £5m goods-in-transit cover
  • Outcome: Zero unplanned downtime, full chain-of-custody and data destruction certification, on-schedule handover

Background.

The council was midway through a multi-year programme to modernise its digital backbone,  consolidating core compute and storage onto a resilient, sustainably powered platform closer to home, and moving away from an ageing, geographically distant facility that no longer fit its disaster recovery or environmental objectives.

The programme's systems integration partner brought Sunspeed in to handle the physical migration requirement: getting the estate safely out of the old site and stood back up in the new one, and cleanly retiring what wasn't coming with it.

The challenge.

The project was composed of two distinct elements:

  1. Relocation — around 185 physical devices and roughly 1,200 copper, fibre and proprietary cables needed to move between sites hundreds of miles apart, with no accurate rack plan or patching schedule to start from and a single fixed migration window to hit.
  2. Decommissioning — over 600 legacy drives and mixed devices at the destination site, including older-generation hardware, needed auditing, data destruction and compliant disposal without disrupting live operations nearby.

Public sector data, tight downtime tolerances, and a "fix-forward" mandate (no rollback option) meant the project needed to be meticulously planned and executed according to strict project governance.

Our solution.

Audit. Sunspeed ran a full hardware and end-to-end cable trace audit at the source site, since existing records weren't reliable enough to plan against. The output fed a single infrastructure planner — asset schedule, rack elevations and patching schedule — used to design the destination layout.

Pre-cable. As much of the destination cabling as possible was installed and labelled in advance, so the live migration window was spent moving and reconnecting equipment, not running new cable.

Migration. Three teams worked in sequence — de-rack and pack at source, transport, then re-rack and cable-connect at destination — covering a ~29-hour window from power-down to handover, with basic layer-1 handover support built in once the last connection was made.

Decommissioning. At the outgoing site, Sunspeed de-racked a populated rack, captured serial numbers on site, and shredded all data-bearing drives on site over two days (several legacy drives couldn't be securely wiped and needed physical destruction). Every asset was tracked from collection through to a Certificate of Data Destruction and Recycling Confirmation Certificate.

Outcomes.

  • Full estate relocated and reconnected within the agreed migration window, with the client's own team powering up and testing on schedule the following morning.
  • 531 drives and 79 mixed devices securely destroyed or recycled, fully certified
  • A complete, signed-off infrastructure planner handed back to the client as the new source of truth for the environment.
  • No equipment rollback required — the fix-forward approach held.