How Horizon helped one data analytics firm achieve the outcomes it needed in reconfiguring its international data center resources.
When it’s time to decommission all or part of a data center, the logistics can feel overwhelming. There’s much to consider and even more to do.
One customer, a leading provider of digital audience analysis, turned to Horizon for help with decommissioning not just one but a chunk of its global data center portfolio.
The client first came to Horizon for help with recovering value from retiring enterprise hard drives used across its data centers.
“We did that a few times via revenue share, returning money to the company’s IT budget,” remarks Stephen Buckler, chief operating officer at Horizon Technology. “They then asked us if we could help them with decommissioning data centers.”
Global Decommissioning
In total, Horizon decommissioned more than a dozen of the client’s data centers across North America, Europe, and Asia, with minimum disruption and maximum efficiency in each instance.
Project planning for each region varied, dependent on local circumstances. In North America, Horizon shipped whole servers to its secure ITAD facility in California for processing. It undertook similar processing locally for the south east Asian and western European sites.
For each decommission and regardless of location, Horizon drew on its deep expertise in handling data center hardware.
“Our strength of process and our detailed record-keeping resulted in turnkey decommissioning for our customer, while maintaining full compliance with domestic regulations wherever we were operating in the world,” Buckler remarks.
From Initial Planning Through Deinstall
Robust preparation across all stages of each decommission, from initial planning and asset tagging through deinstall and final reconciliation, proved critical, he says.
“The overall coordination of our global team was excellent. Irrespective of the volume of servers we were dealing with and any compliance considerations such as GDPR that we needed to navigate on a region-by-region basis, the project team stayed on track and on point throughout.”
Decommissioning a data center is no small matter. Horizon prides itself on the strength of its workflows and its commitment to leaving no stone unturned.
Our strength of process and our detailed record-keeping resulted in turnkey decommissioning for our customer, while maintaining full compliance with domestic regulations wherever we were operating in the world.
For more insight into our processes, check out our handy seven-step checklist for data center decommissioning or contact us today for support.
In our checklist, we describe the key stages to ensuring a smooth decommissioning:
- Initial set-up
- Itemizing
- Planning
- Tooling up
- Removing your equipment and data sanitization
- Packing and clean up
- Coordination and recovery
