North American Network Operators Group

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Re: Cable Colors

  • From: Joe Abley
  • Date: Tue Jun 17 13:28:56 2008


On 17 Jun 2008, at 11:25, Justin M. Streiner wrote:


I was in a data center for a large bank here in Pittsburgh a few years ago, and they definitely went the extra mile to keep their cable plant neatly organized and properly dressed, and they continued to maintain that after the building was turned up.

A boutique hosting company of my acquaintance once decided that cable management within racks was rather important -- they had the rather pragmatic opinion that setting things up right to start with was not enough, and that they also needed a conscious plan to keep things tidy as the cabinets filled up that did not rely on techs following rules or being diligent.


The initial cable install for the pre-provisioned servers was done with much planning and documentation by people who did data cabling for a living, and was correspondingly tidy. The cables were all blue. Any change that was required after that was installed using a red cable.

Once per week the data cabling people would return, within a posted window, and replace the temporary red patch cables with cut-to-length, tested, blue cables which were run according to the larger cabling strategy, and rigourously documented.

This approach had the advantage that the cabinets always looked pristine and the documentation was always current (modulo a few red cables), regardless of what changes had happened since the original install, and regardless of who had made those changes.

The theory was that bringing in dedicated cabling contractors to do audits once per week was cheaper in the grand scheme of things than dealing with the implications of messy cabling. There was an additional advantage that any potential customer who was shown the suite was overwhelmed with the pristine neatness of it, and felt immediately comfortable with the idea of emptying their own appallingly messy and undocumented machine room into such a place.


Joe