Help with organizing CAT5 cables to patch panels!

[mrjiles]

I have nobody else to ask, so hopefully someone can give me some help! Cable management has become such a gigantic pain for me!! I always see these pretty pictures of nicely wired patch panels, and it makes me jealous When I first wired this 2 years ago, I had never done anything this large, so I never encountered cable management.

I have approximately 200 CAT5 cables coming into 5 48 port patch panels. The patch panels are mounted in my 4-post rack (open rack). I have my battery backup and servers at the bottom end and patch panels at the very top. The large "blob" of cables come in from the top (not neat or orderly). The numbering scheme I have came up with is: A101, A102, A103 (where the letter is a room, and the number is the jack). I have kept the rooms together and the numbers in order, but this is difficult to do (what ends up happening is the cables end up getting tangled, just so I can keep them in order). Is there another system I should use instead? Should I use a whole sh*t load of cable ties?

I'm looking for some tips from someone with experience in this. I'll post some pics if needed also.

[Ludo]

Hi,

I just wonder if this is a "static" environment, or if you need to patch it every day with some other connection ?

5 x 48 is "a lot", but not that "much". There are nice latching systems that you can fit between the different patch panels, but is your rack was not designed with these right from the beginning, it may be impossible to introduce now. And yes, they do get tangled. Unlike your cabinet, these nicely wired cabinets hardly ever change, and were wired all at the same time.

Assuming the cabling is "static" and given "an open wreck" (rack ), I would suggest :

- devide every patch panel in 4 areas : far left, middle left, middle right, far right
- all cables that go to the left of a patch panel : keep them left
- cables to the right : keep them right
- you have 5 patch panels - on the left you will have 5 x 2 cable lanes, on the right you will have 5 x 2 cable lanes.
- on every horizontal beam (even better : add more), fix 10 cable ties : make loops of about 5cm diameter, and attach these neatly next to each other
- 10 loops left, 10 loops right
- now route your cables through these loops : the cables that go to the top patch panel far left go into the first (front) cable lane, the cables to the middle left go in the second. Cables to the 2nd patch panel, far left go in the 3rd, cables for the 2nd panel middel left in the 4th - and so on.
- don't tighten the loops you made, leave them open - you will need to correct the errors
- if you want to you can tighten the individual lanes (max. 12 cables) with other cable ties.

Watch out : keep the cables on the outside of the posts and not in the area where you eventually have to add equipment one day.

And first : agree with your manager or who-ever that you expect frequent interuptions for at least a day !

Good luck ! I know the feeling

Ludo

[blueznl]

I'm professionally involved in the datacenter business. Post me an image and perhaps I can point you in the right direction. I also need to now what frequency of changes you deal with...

[mrjiles]

Thanks Ludo for the suggestions. I've even read about tagging the wall plate with the patch panel & port number (ie first patch panel is A, port 42, so a wall plate would be A42). But this would mean that the ports in the same room would not necessarily be labeled in numerical order... a room with 4 drops could be labeled A42, B12, C48, D9. Not too difficult to trace and I could simply untangle the cords, zip tie them and relabel the wall plates.

Here are a few photos of the mess! I'm a nit-picker and it's driving me crazy!

http://img202.imageshack.us/i/48598640.jpg/
http://img14.imageshack.us/i/14146784.jpg/
http://img267.imageshack.us/i/46415577.jpg/


> Changes are rare. The last change I made was simply because someone rearranged their office!

[GWarner]

Spaghetti anyone?

(Sorry, I couldn't resist... )

[naw]

The only way you will reduce your cabling is to go to Blades or VMware -or- VMware on Blades. Unix systems have been partitioned for years.

The fact is that cabling starts messy, then gets messier and finally becomes a mess.

If you have 200 cables, then you probably have 75 - 100 servers probably aged up to 6yrs old.

I do lots (and lots) of server consolidation studies for companies with 10's to 100's to 1000's of servers and I'd guess you could replace 80% of your Wintel servers with 3 - 4 modern 4W 8Core boxes (like the modular IBM x3850 running VMware) for less than 100K and you'd recoup your costs in 6 - 18months...

[blueznl]

I hope I misunderstood the image... are you patching on the backside of your racks?!?

[mrjiles]

Sorry for the delay....

No, those pictures are of the cables that terminated at the back of the patch panels (wall jacks to patch panels). Those are the cables I can't clean up! The patch cables themselves are fine, those I have hidden in cable managers.

Sorry for any confusion!

[blueznl]

Never relabel stuff unless necessary. Choose one numbering system, then stick to it.

Either...

1. Number everything per room, ie. floor 2 room 3 wallbox 1 port 1 would be something like 203011, and mark the panels in your patch cabinet in the same way,

OR

2. Number the ports on the patch panels in your patchrack, and make those in the rooms match up.

I prefer method 2. If someone tells me port 2147 is broken, I'll just grab my list, and I'll notice it's in room 17 on the 27 floor, okay, got it. You'll have to keep a list of things anyway in case something goes seriously wrong.

Relabeling would invalidate any such list, so that's never a good idea

Here's two images that may show slightly better cabling styles for the back of your rack.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/52539637@N04/4843501856/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/52539637@N04/4842885279/

[mrjiles]

Thanks blueznl! Slightly better is an understatement!

I too like option #2. This is what I had in mind as well. This also makes future new drops easy to manage.

Thanks for everyone's suggestions!