Data Center Cable Management

A picture, they say, is worth a thousand words. So I will, for a change, keep my talking to a minimum and just ask you: How would you like to be the guy stuck under those cables in picture below?

He would spend half his day untangling himself from those vines of cable wires, I guess.

Or, take a look at this data center. I envy the data center maintenance guy who has to look for a fault in this data center. I bet he takes his food supplies and survival kit when he’s about to dive in.

These kinds of data centers, although they look colourful and can be the butt of all office jokes, are not exactly suitable from a cooling and fault location point of view. A data center like the one above might spend excessive amount of capital in cooling solutions. But if there is unbroken obstruction in the cold airflow path, the purpose is just not met. This leads to an increase in localised heating and will damage the equipment. The hot or cold air must at every instance have uninterrupted pathway to enter and leave the devices.

You also don’t want the maintenance expert to set fire to the data center when you ask him to locate a fault in one of the cables. The cables should be easily traceable to and from the devices. This is not only an effort to make the maintenance departments’ life a little easier, but a well managed data center cabling system saves time. Not only that, you will save considerable amounts of cable if it is well organized.

Also, remember that it is not advisable to take your client on a data center tour if your data center looks like cable jungle. It’s, after all, about the presentation. If your data center looks like something out of the swamp, well, I don’t need to tell you the rest.

Data center cable management, though not mandatory, is good practice. You can keep it in mind when you start off a data center. But if you already have one and you think it needs some organizing, you can get in touch with Cable Organizer or Panduit.

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