shipping pre-built cabinets vs. build-on-site

[Joe Abley <jabley () hopcount ca>]

Hi all,

Anybody here have experience shipping pre-built cabinets, with ~20U of  
routers and servers installed, connected and tested, to remote sites  
for deployment?

The idea is to increase the consistency of the deployments by having  
them all built in one place by the same set of people, and to reduce  
the amount of time required by warm bodies on-site (bodies that would  
otherwise have to receive individual components and install/cable them).

We've located a few vendors who sell shock-tolerant cabinets, but  
they're expensive and seem to me to be aimed at people who need to  
ship a set of equipment frequently (e.g. to support movie shoots,  
outside broadcasts, etc), rather than people who want to ship just once.

The destination in all cases would be a commercial, modern data  
centre. The equipment would be shipped from LA.

Do I even need to spend time wondering about shock-tolerant cabinets,  
or should I instead be concentrating on finding the right company to  
wrap the cabinets for shipping, and to do the shipping itself?


Joe