On Wed, Nov 19, 2008 at 09:55:04AM +0200, Alexios Zavras wrote: > Tom, hi from Greece! > > I've just noticed that all the links for the chapter-by-chapter notes > http://www.everythingsysadmin.com/chapterbychapter.html > return empty pages -- I seem to remember there was content there, once. > > I was looking for an answer to the following: > I'm installing some equipment on a customer data center > (~100 servers, Netapps, switches, etc.). > The customer insists that, in order to have the cabling "neat", > all cables should be "made-to-measure", i.e. cut and made on the spot, > without any excess loops. He even suggested this for power cords!
I think it's a bit crazy, especially when you can get pre-built network cables in 1 foot increments here in the US. Hopefully you can find something similar in Europe. I'd be worried about the safety of site-built power cords. For servers with cable arms, it makes it easy to 'hide' a little extra power or network cable length in the arm. We bought a range of pre-made power cords in different lengths depending on where the server is located in the rack. We also put a piece of 5" panduit duct vertically betweeen each server cabinet. This provides a place to run network and power cables and keeps the mess out of the back of a rack. It's worked really well for us: http://www.smoe.org/jeffw/gallery-new/e_dc_build_2008-10-06/IMG_5581 I'm a datacenter/infrastructure junkie, so I've spent a lot of time over my career thinking about how to make datacenters easier to cable & keep them neat over time. For example, on my most recent project we chose to have our switches pre-cabled to a patch panel. This way, the switch face stays very neat, and replacing a failed blade can be done very quickly: http://www.smoe.org/jeffw/gallery-new/e_dc_build_2008-10-06/IMG_5546 In the racks where the network cabinets and the switch face cables are terminated, we chose to intermingle the switch ports and the cabinet ports. This allowed us to use 2' and 3' patch cords to connect cabinets to switch ports, and makes the cabling very neat. You can see the rear of one of those patch panels here: http://www.smoe.org/jeffw/gallery-new/e_dc_build_2008-10-06/IMG_5562 The blue cables are from the switches, and the white cables are from the server racks. If you look at the front of that rack, you can see how the short patch cords keep the cabling neat: http://www.smoe.org/jeffw/gallery-new/e_dc_build_2008-10-06/IMG_5593 The Ortonics Mighty Mo racks and cable cages make it easy to have very dense patch panels without any horizontal cable managers and still be neat. It's one of the best things I've seen for datacenters yet. I've got a lot of other photos at: http://www.smoe.org/jeffw/gallery-new/e_dc_build_2008-10-06 and would be happy to answer questions! -j _______________________________________________ Tech mailing list [email protected] http://lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tech This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/
