Data Center Relocations, Computer Room Relocations

Mover's Insurance

It is surprising to learn that in most states, mover's insurance amounts to no more than $0.60 a pound, about the same as traveling with your luggage on an airline. When planning the relocation of IT equipment , you essentially have four choices:

Accept the mover's insurance. We find this choice totally unacceptable.
Obtain a rider onto your existing insurance policy to cover the value of the equipment being moved.
For larger companies, you can self-insure.
Use vendor insurance if available. Note that very few vendors offer insurance and for those that do, its expensive.

If your company is large enough to have a risk assessment person, contact that person and have them advise you on how to insure the move. Choice #2 above is often the best choice.

One hint on moving IT equipment is to not let all of your equipment ride in one truck. Split up the load and, split the risk. On large moves, we never let too much equipment ride on one truck. It takes more trucks and the relocation event takes longer but we choose to minimize the risk. On one recent move, where the total value of the server room equipment was $35 million, the insurance rider was written to cover $10 million. Thus, we used 5 trucks. Additionally, the insurance company was concerned enough about the shipments that they had an unmarked car with two security officers trail each of the five trucks.

Very few vendors offer relocation insurance. Two that do are IBM and DEC (although DEC may have changed wit their sale to Compaq). IBM will offer different kinds of insurance including a type that will provide complete and immediate replacement of the machine. On rare jobs, we have seen IBM tie up a like piece of mainframe equipment that was for sale for 60 days. That "hold" option was part of the insurance quote. Of course, IBM had control of the entire move event for their own equipment. We are not aware of any other equipment manufacturer that offers that level of insurance. In our last conversation with Sun Microsystems regarding the relocation of their large Sun systems, they don't offer any insurance. They defer to their movers and you already know what the mover's insurance will provide. Some movers, however, do have rider insurance.