Data center decommissioning is more than powering off servers and rolling racks out the door.
A decom touches applications, routing, firewall policies, DNS, identity, storage, monitoring, vendor circuits,
contracts, compliance, and (sometimes) facilities and HVAC.
Below is a structured, field-ready checklist written from the perspective of an IT Network Architect—focused on
minimizing risk, preventing “mystery outages,” and leaving behind clean documentation.
1) Define Scope, Governance, and Success Criteria
Start by clarifying what “decommissioning” means in your situation:
- IT-only decom: retiring compute, storage, and network gear while the facility remains.
- Facility/cage decom: retiring gear plus power/cooling, cross-connects, leases, and vendor circuits.
- Partial decom: a room, pod, cage, row, or specific environment segment.
Establish change management expectations up front:
- Maintenance windows, blackout dates, and a communications plan.
- Required approvals (application owners, security/compliance, facilities, vendors).
- Rollback expectations and “stop/go” checkpoints.
- Clear success criteria (e.g., no active workloads, no dependencies, contracts closed, CMDB updated).
2) Identify Assets and Map Dependencies (Not Just a Hardware List)
Take a comprehensive inventory of what you plan to retire and, more importantly, what depends on it.
Include both IT and non-IT elements where applicable:
- Compute/virtualization: hosts, clusters, hypervisors, management planes.
- Storage: SAN/NAS, replication links, snapshots, zoning, storage networks.
- Network: switches, routers, firewalls, load balancers, VPN, WAN edge, VRFs, BGP peers.
- Addressing and services: IPAM, DNS records, NAT policies, VIPs, certificates.
- Identity and access: AD joins, SSO dependencies, service accounts, privileged access.
- Observability: monitoring, syslog/SIEM pipelines, SNMP, alerting destinations.
- Circuits and cross-connects: DIA, MPLS, dark fiber, carrier handoffs, colocation cross-connects.
- Facilities (if in scope): racks, PDUs, UPS, HVAC/cooling resources tied to the environment.
The goal here is to avoid decommissioning “supporting infrastructure” that still has an active dependency—especially
common with legacy DNS entries, firewall objects, VIPs, and circuits that were never fully documented.
3) Identify and Notify Stakeholders
After you know what will be decommissioned, identify who owns it and who depends on it. Notify early and often:
- Application and service owners
- Security/compliance stakeholders
- Facilities (if power/cooling/space is impacted)
- Vendors and carriers (circuits, MSPs, colocation providers)
- Operations teams (monitoring/NOC/SOC) to prevent unnecessary escalations
Make sure the stakeholder list includes the people who will get paged if something goes sideways—those teams should
not be hearing about it for the first time during the change window.
4) Create a Migration and Cutover Plan
If equipment is being replaced, or workloads are moving to another data center or the cloud, create a plan that
includes both the migration steps and the network cutover implications:
- Sequencing and maintenance windows
- Routing changes (BGP, VRFs, summarization, path preferences, asymmetric routing risks)
- Firewall and NAT updates
- Load balancer changes (VIP moves, pool members, health monitors)
- DNS cutovers and TTL strategy
- Testing plan and rollback plan
- Stabilization period after cutover
5) Create Backups and Confirm Data Retention Requirements
Backups are a best practice, but in real environments you also need to align with data retention rules:
- Confirm what must be retained, archived, or deleted (legal/compliance matters).
- Capture backups or archives where required.
- Validate at least a sample restore path so you’re not discovering backup issues after shutdown.
6) Migrate Workloads and Validate Functionality
Perform the migration and validate that the new environment is stable:
- Functional testing (user and application checks)
- Monitoring health (alerts green, logs flowing, synthetic checks passing)
- Performance validation (latency, throughput, error rates)
If the replacement environment is not ready (not ideal, but sometimes reality), use a controlled temporary landing
zone (e.g., short-term cloud storage or a transitional compute tier). Make that temporary state explicit so it does
not become a permanent “forgotten” dependency.
7) Decommission Integrations: DNS, IPAM, Firewall Objects, Monitoring, and Access
Before wiping and powering off, remove or update anything that will keep pointing to the old environment:
- DNS records (A/AAAA/CNAME), reverse DNS where applicable, and related documentation
- IPAM/CMDB updates to reflect the planned retirement
- Firewall rules, NAT policies, address objects, and security groups
- Load balancer objects (VIPs, pools, iRules/policies, monitors)
- Routing policies (prefix-lists, route-maps, advertisements)
- Monitoring targets, alert routes, and dashboards to prevent noisy “phantom” alerts
- Service accounts, credentials, privileged access, and any shared secrets tied to the decom environment
8) Sanitize Systems and Media (Do This with an Approved Method)
After workloads are migrated and validated—and before equipment leaves your custody—sanitize data in a way that
matches your security/compliance requirements:
- Use an approved sanitization method appropriate for the media type (HDD, SSD, self-encrypting drives).
- Where applicable, ensure encryption key destruction is performed and recorded.
- Retain evidence of sanitization for audit and compliance purposes.
9) Power Down Assets (Gracefully) and Remove Equipment
Even if you believe the data is gone, avoid “just pulling the plug” as your default operational practice.
A clean shutdown prevents confusion later and reduces the risk of last-minute surprises.
- Stop services cleanly (especially clustered systems).
- Gracefully shut down hosts, storage controllers, and network devices.
- Confirm the asset is no longer reachable and no longer referenced by critical dependencies.
- Remove cabling and label anything that will be reused elsewhere.
10) Finalize Accounts, Licenses, and Contracts
Close out any recurring costs and entitlements tied to the retired environment:
- Carrier circuits and cross-connects (avoid paying for dead links)
- MSP monitoring/maintenance contracts
- Licenses that can be reclaimed (virtualization, backup agents, monitoring, security tooling)
- Support contracts for hardware no longer in service
11) Dispose of Assets via Approved ITAD (Chain of Custody Matters)
Asset disposal should be treated as a security and compliance activity, not a facilities chore:
- Use an approved IT Asset Disposition (ITAD) vendor when possible.
- Maintain chain-of-custody documentation from rack to final disposition.
- Obtain certificates of destruction/recycling where required.
- Reconcile asset tags and serial numbers so your inventory reflects reality.
Resale or reuse can be viable if permitted by policy, but ensure sanitization standards and documentation are
still met before anything leaves your control.
12) Document the Decommissioning Process (Throughout the Project)
Documentation is not a single step at the end—it should be updated at every phase. Maintain a record of:
- What was decommissioned (asset IDs, serials, locations, owners)
- When it was decommissioned (change records, dates, windows)
- How it was decommissioned (migration approach, sanitization method, validation evidence)
- Where it went (ITAD vendor, recycled, destroyed, transferred)
- What was updated (DNS/IPAM/CMDB, firewall rules, monitoring targets, routing changes)
Clean documentation prevents future reverse engineering and keeps your environment from accumulating “ghost” objects in DNS, firewall policies, and monitoring platforms.