Case study
An estate audit that reclaimed 14 racks of stranded capacity
A retail group suspected it was paying for data centre capacity it no longer used but had no reliable record to prove it. DataOptix audited every cabinet across two halls, capturing assets, port usage and measured power draw. The reconciliation identified 14 racks of reclaimable space and eleven devices drawing power with no current owner.
Retail group (anonymised)Amsterdam
- 14
- Racks of capacity reclaimed
- 11
- Unowned devices identified
- 2
- Halls audited cabinet by cabinet
- 100%
- Cabinets photographed front and rear
Challenge
What the customer was facing
- An asset register maintained in spreadsheets that had not been reconciled against the hall in over three years
- Colocation invoices rising annually with no way to challenge what was actually needed
- A planned hardware refresh that could not be scoped without knowing what was installed
- Several devices nobody in the current team could identify or claim
Solution
What we did
- A cabinet-by-cabinet physical walk of both halls, recording make, model and serial for every device
- Port and cross-connect mapping, including links terminating on equipment nobody had listed
- Measured power draw per circuit and per cabinet, rather than nameplate figures
- Photographic evidence of every cabinet front and rear as an auditable record
- Reconciliation against the existing register, delivered as a discrepancy report in their CMDB import format
Result
Where it left them
The group decommissioned the unowned equipment, consolidated into fewer cabinets and renegotiated its colocation footprint at renewal. The audit dataset then became the baseline for the hardware refresh that had been stalled for lack of accurate information.
Services used
What this project drew on
Have a project like this?
Tell us what you have and what it needs to become. A coordinator replies within 2 business hours.