At RS we would burn the servers in measure the load with a clamp meter. For large scale build-outs(swift, cloud servers) we would burn-in entire racks and measure the load reported by the DC power equipment.
I would recommend verifying everything is fault tolerant/HA as expected every step of the way. We ran into issues where the power strips on both sides were plugged into the same circuit(D'oh), wrong SST's, redundant routers getting cabled up to the same power strips, etc and you name it.
After a rack is setup have people at the DC(your own employees or the DC's techs) help simulate(create) failure in power, networking, and systems to verify everything is setup correct. It sounds like you have people coming onboard with experience provisioning/delivering physical systems though, so I would expect them to be on the ball with most of this stuff.
I would recommend verifying everything is fault tolerant/HA as expected every step of the way. We ran into issues where the power strips on both sides were plugged into the same circuit(D'oh), wrong SST's, redundant routers getting cabled up to the same power strips, etc and you name it.
After a rack is setup have people at the DC(your own employees or the DC's techs) help simulate(create) failure in power, networking, and systems to verify everything is setup correct. It sounds like you have people coming onboard with experience provisioning/delivering physical systems though, so I would expect them to be on the ball with most of this stuff.