Our valued clients have spoken - and we are providing what they want. Most of the move support blog feedback of late has been... "Yeah, yeah, that text is informative, but what happened to all the pictures? We want pictures again."

So here is an update, complete with pictures. We are about 95% complete with server moves. Last night was particularly productive. We moved over 40 servers from Bothell to our new Seattle facility. These included mostly single-server colocation machines. We also moved three half-rack clients with relatively complex server setups - such as a combination of firewalls, load balancers, large storage arrays, etc. It was a long night, but we had a full turnout and lots of help.

Above: digital.forest Sysadmin Extraordinaire Dave Rose and Overnight Shift Support Guy Christian Garland watch a server come up after being racked.

Above: Nirav Patel from Pragmatyxs brings up a server.

Above: digital.forest Network Manager Kyle Murray prepares to punch down a new network drop for two of our favorite colocation customers. Servers from Car Toys and Neptune.com are in the foreground.

Speaking of Car Toys... we heard from them that their online store's revenue grew in 2004, from the previous year - by 945%(!) The Car Toys Online group were named "Department Of The Year" in 2004 for this achievement. Congratulations from all of us at digital.forest!

This goes to prove something we have always believed: The Internet is an excellent place to conduct business, and the "dot com crash" was merely a speed bump on the road to success. Those businesses that kept their commitment to electronic commerce through the slowdown are beginning to see rewards for their efforts. The costs to operate a half-rack of servers and maintain a small web development staff must be a fraction of operating a traditional physical retail outlet. Car Toys' experience has shown that their online store does not "cannibalize" sales from their "brick and mortar" stores though, if anything it has opened up regions they don't yet serve with retail outlets. They operate stores from Seattle to Houston, yet their online store operates "coast to coast" 24 hours a day. Hard to argue with 945% growth too.

We only have a few servers left to move from Bothell. Once that work is complete we have quite a bit of finish work to do at the Seattle facility. The reboot system is not yet fully functional here, as we have some equipment to move and systems to re-program. We also have a lot of "tie-down" work to do. This involves cleaning up the inevitable wire mess that seems to gather around all computers. We'll illustrate how that works in an upcoming blog post.

We finally were able to empty enough racks out of Bothell to start building the last few rows for servers at the new facility.

Above: Damian Amrhein and Kyle Murray pull cable bundles into the latest row of racks.

After all the racks are removed from Bothell, we can pull the bracing plates from them and mount them between the overhead ladder rack and the rows of racks here in Seattle. This provides further structural rigidity to the rack system. After that completes, we decommission the electrical and HVAC systems at Bothell. That should wrap up by end of March.

We hope you enjoyed this latest news and we promise to post more pictures in upcoming blog updates. Thanks!