I once basically spent a summer doing this, not over a parking lot but to consolidate the remaining equipment in a large number of racks into a few new ones - t

I once basically spent a summer doing this, not over a parking lot but to consolidate the remaining equipment in a large number of racks into a few new ones - this was a former sales office of a megacorporation that had been built to have its 1970s-era computer room proudly displayed through windows into the main conference room, a very weird setup without the context that in said '70s that conference room was used to pitch prospective customers on business automation. Anyway, by the time I was there it was still a '70s-vintage large computer room but now massively overprovisioned on space, cooling, etc, particularly with most IT functions having moved to corporate. A decision was made to repurpose part of it as a test lab and move all the actual remaining equipment to three racks in the corner. I'd do about two servers a day in between other things, taking advantage of redundant power supplies to transfer the PSUs one at a time to extension cords, swap to a long network cable fast enough that TCP sessions probably didn't time out, and then unrack onto a hydraulic lift card and do the same procedure the other way. I presented this at the start as far from a guaranteed strategy - that it would minimize downtime but there would inevitably be some due to mistakes. None of this was really that critical. There were a few devices that were pretty old and poorly maintained, we agreed up front that if these lost power for some reason and then failed to boot, we would just say they'd lived long lives and purchase replacements. I guess the point is that this whole situation was kind of unusual and I would generally not recommend doing this, we were lucky that all the equipment left had stakeholders that acknowledged it was legacy stuff and they could tolerate losing it. The irony is, of course, that it went perfectly. So far as I know there was not a single problem experienced through the whole thing. I even managed to swap the phone lines to the (surprisingly busy!) legacy fax server when each was out of use.