Rack Transport Stability Team
Goal: To produce voluntary industry-wide test procedures and criteria for shipping large IT products on casters, cushioned or regular pallets, and/or shipping crates. If you are interested in becoming an active participant of this important project please contact either Eric Hiser of ISTA 517-333-3437 or John Hayward of Hayward Consulting, LLC 281-221-9379.
Project Description: The goal of the Rack Transport Stability Team is to produce voluntary industry-wide test procedures and criteria for shipping large IT products on casters, cushioned or regular pallets, and/or shipping crates. The project goal is to improve transportation stability for products such as racks and storage systems when shipped, relocated or returned. The project may include test procedures for caster robustness, as well as static and/or dynamic stability. We anticipate gathering information on the ground transportation environment, including trucking and also material handling practices such as fork lifts, pallet jacks or manual handling. Environmental characterization, dynamic studies and modeling should be the basis for the project. The test procedures and criteria should be based on most likely conditions, rather than exceptions.
Participating Team Members: ABF, Allianz, Clemson University, Dell, HP, Huawei, IBM, ISTA, Knurr, McCollister’s, Nelson, Oracle, Smithers, Panduit, Teradata and TransPak.
RTST Mover's Guide
The Rack Transport Stability Team (RTST) collaboratively developed a Mover's Guide with the objective of documenting safer handling practices for large information technology rack products such as servers and storage systems. As one of the project milestones, the intent of the Mover's Guide is to raise awareness of business partners and carriers of the potential for personal injury and/or financial loss during transport of racks. The Guide communicates and emphasizes new and existing safe handling procedures, with the goal to eliminate incidents going forward.
PDF format of the RTST Mover's Guide is available in the following languages: English, Chinese, Japanese, Brazil, Italian, Korean, Taiwan, Turkish and Spanish