I've been known to put servers in a car/truck and bring it down to the local UPS (or similar type of shipping) store and have them deal with it since they'll have the pallets, wrapping/packing material, etc. It'd probably be good to call ahead of time w/ some measurements, though. The last time I went this way I just brought it down to the store and it took them a day or so to get things together to pack it all up.
If this is something you're going to do frequently or if you have a lot of servers to ship, then I'd look at getting my own material to do it. It really depends on the shape and weight of the servers, but plastic wrapped server in cardboard box w/ blocks of foam, probably plastic wrapped again, and attached to a pallet. Also, is there data on these servers? Is it sensitive data? Do you care about the data? On RAID arrays that I've shipped around, I've been known to pull the drives and ship them separately, split into 2 or 3 shipments. The goal being that there shouldn't be enough disks in any one shipment which would allow for the data to be read/reconstructed. Encrypting the data is also useful, of course, if that's an option. It's probably obvious, but before using the servers on the remote side, make sure to have someone go through and make sure nothing came loose during shipping. Cables, RAM, IO Boards, etc, can look like they're ok but really be slightly popped out causing havoc. On Thu, Apr 12, 2012 at 2:22 PM, Joshua Nichols < [email protected]> wrote: > Does anyone have any tips on safely shipping large (i.e. 4U, 5U) servers > across the country when original packaging is unavailable? I realize this > is a bit plebeian, but I'm sure someone on this list has some meaningful > advice on it. >
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