How to Deal With the Cable Spaghetti

Everyone loves a plate of delicious spaghetti, but everybody hates when network wires become so tangled that it looks like spaghetti. Even for seasoned network cabling installers or system administrators, cable spaghetti isn't only assaulting to their eyes and dignity, it can actually impede the ability to troubleshoot IT issues. People who had the experience of re-cabling or organizing the cable spaghetti, they may understand that prevent your network from being confused with spaghetti usually takes regular planning and maintenance. Otherwise, it will drive you to the blink of insanity, just as the engineers in the picture. Here are what you should know about the best practices that will prevent from bad spaghetti.

Use Appropriate Cable Length

Every cable installer might have the experience. It is a nightmare to use a 25-foot cable or longer one to connect two severs that only five feet from each other, so the extra length will lead to major spaghetti problems in the future. Additionally, excess cable becomes a trouble to manage in a high density fiber cable management because when there is too much cable, there's no where to put it. Invest in the right size cable, and your racks will be much more manageable. Just take the time to measure your cables and only using the exact length that you need, not only will it make your server room look organized, but it will also increase overall efficiency.

Bundle the Cables

When making large horizontal or vertical runs, bundling the cables together makes them look nice and clean. Using cable ties, or wraps will keep the cables together. You can also use them to attach your cable bundle to infrastructure pieces.

Run Cables in Channels

Instead of stringing cables randomly between devices, create a clear pathway for the cables to follow. For all cables leaving the rack, have them climb up the outer wall of the rack, cross over, crawl down the other rack, fan out horizontally and plug in.

Label Your Cables

When first installing cables or cleaning up, always remember to label every single cable on the rack. This step adds a few extra minutes of labor to the installation, but it will save you a major headache in the long run. For example, if you want to upgrade to higher bandwidth, you will have to unplug a bunch of wires and replace some new cables. having labels on them allows you to immediately know where to plug them back in.

Take the Future Proof into Account

A man without distant care must have near sorrow, this saying is also applied in the cable installation. If you install your network infrastructure that only covers your current needs, then you will be facing a spaghetti situation in the future when it comes to add more wires into full conduits. Thus to avoid this problem, you are supposed to carefully planning out your network, and position existing and future equipment in spots that will use less cable length and have minimal overlap.

Don't Forget Bend Radius

Bend radius is the maximum angle that a cable can be bent. If you over-bend cables, they will break or become damaged. Then they will not function properly. This is especially true for fiber cables, which can be sensitive to bends. Proper cable management will keep your infrastructure functioning by maintaining proper bend radius.

How to Tackle the Bad Cable Spaghetti

• Admit the problem—It's tempting to loosely string a cable from point A to point B. It's quick, easy, and you don't have to deal with the real issues. But you're only hurting yourself. The next time you need to make a patch, commit to doing it the right way. It will pay off in the end.
• Clear your schedule—Now that you are no longer contributing to the problem, it is time to check your calendar. Block out a large chunk of time to clean up the mess. Oftentimes, you will need to work whenever the office is empty since users could lose connectivity to the network.
• Make a list of supplies—Having the right accessories is essential to a job well done. If you have the correct supplies, it's easier to clean up and keep your site organized. The rack clean up essentials include: cable management, cable ties, finger nail clippers, scissors, labels, horizontal management, vertical cable management.
• Just go for it—The final step is to bite the bullet and just start. It won't get any easier than it is today. Assemble your supplies, set the date and go for it. You will thank yourself later.

Conclusion

To sum up, this article recommends several tips for preventing from cable spaghetti for your data center solution. Besides the above suggestions, there are two overarching themes that you should bear in mind—do not take shortcuts and careful planning. FS.COM as a rising telecommunication manufacturer, will work closely with your business to understand your needs and come up with a network layout that will handle your growth. Our cable management accessories like cable ties, wire Loom, cable lacing shelf, D-Ring cable manager etc., are all provided. If you have any requirement, please send your request to us.

Which Cabling Solution is Better for Your Data Center

Although cabling only represents less than 10 percent of the overall data center network investment, it outlives most network elements and treated as the most difficult and potentially costly component. With the datacenter cabling ranging from 1G to 10G, 10G to 40G and even to 100G, more complex cabling is required to ensure a good service or scalability for troubleshooting. In practice, there is no exact solution that will meet all of the cable management needs. However, two kinds of cabling systems can be applied—unstructured system and structured system. Just follow the guidelines and illustration highlighted in the article will go a long way to ensure you with the information required for the successful deployment of a cabling infrastructure in your data center.

Unstructured Cabling System

Unlike the structured cabling system with a managed patch panel, a unstructured cabling only occurs when optical links are deployed point to point or device to device without installing patch panels. In this situation, cabling pathways become congested with an entangled mess of two-fiber optical patch cords. Likewise, routing new patch cords in ceiling or floor trays all the way across a data center each time a new device is deployed is extremely inefficient.

And this entanglement will bring difficulties in routing new patch cords in ceiling or floor trays all the way across the data center whenever a new device is deployed. That greatly influences work efficiency. What’s more, this system causes the overheating of data centers especially around the racks where cable clutter occurs.

Structured Cabling System

Structure cabling emerged as a way to better manage larger data center solution is a big step for the development of optical technology. Structured cabling system is a flexible, reliable and highly efficient for moving, adding and changing the infrastructure as the network grows. This kind of system requires additional investment on pre-terminated MPO cabling such as patch panel to create the cabling infrastructure.

Compared with the unstructured cabling, structured cabling architecture is generally easier to manage and more scalable. And, due to the use of trunked or shared horizontal cabling, it often carries a smaller cable footprint than direct-attach cabling. However, the flexibility of structured cabling presents potential downsides, including cost and link-loss budget. Nevertheless, existing large data centers will likely retain their structured cabling infrastructures, particularly for long-reach, zone-to-zone applications, where it generally remains the more practical choice. The following part will introduce 40G structured cabling solutions.

40G Structured Cabling Solutions

As noted before, structured cabling solutions allow for high consolidation of cabling into a compact patch panel, cabling and connectivity. The traditional duplex multimode SC or LC connections do not support 40G data rate standards, today the MPO technology is commonly found in cassette-based data center installation allowing for easy management and maintenance. Below are cabling solutions of 40G for cable management configurations with the use of MPO patch panel.

One method (seen in the above picture) uses MTP-LC harnesses to transition the MTP connector to LC leads through the use of fiber enclosure loaded with 4 fiber adapter panels (12xMTP Key-up/Key-down). This 12-fiber MTP to LC harness assembly breaks out 4 x LC uniboot legs connecting the SFP+ ports. The lengths of LC harness legs can be customized to adapt to different situations. But this often results in messy cable management. The other method uses MPO/MTP trunk cable and fiber enclosure loaded with 4 MTP high density cassettes (2 x MTP-12 to Duplex LC/UPC 10G OM4) to realize the interconnection. This 96-fiber 1RU rackmount fiber enclosure connects fiber patch cables LC to LC and MTP trunk cable. This method is specially used when the 4xLC ports are not located in close proximity on a single device or are being split between multiple devices. Because it’s more manageable to land the MTP trunk cables into fiber enclosure with individual LC ports for 4xLC patch cables.

Conclusion

Choose the most suitable cabling to support present and future network technology is essential for the long-standing performance of the data center. Structured cabling using an MTP cabling infrastructure is suitable for current 10 Gigabit Ethernet environments while maintaining protection for 40 Gbps environments and beyond. Compared with unstructured cabling, it might be a better solution for you. Except for the right knowledge of a structure cabling, the right tools, patience and discipline are also the key factors that will attribute to the masterpiece of your cable management in data center.