A constant issue for everyone who has anything to do with the IT world is management of wire. There are thousands of images out there of the nightmare that server room or network closet wiring can become.
Here are a couple of my favorites:
Now the first one is entertaining because anyone who has worked in a large datacenter has thought about doing just that. Especially when it’s 3 o’clock in the morning and you don’t feel like routing any more cables.
On the other hand, the second image is one that most people who’ve been in a small business IT closet are familiar with. It’s a small rack, holding a switch and a patch panel (that’s the plate with all of the jacks in it for plugging in network cables – the other end of the cables on the back of the patch panel end up in the walls or floor or at desks out in the work area), with some really messy cable connections between them.
Both of these images show extremely bad cable management, just on different scales. But they both suffer from the same problems. Difficulty in determining which cable goes where. Poor bend radius for the network cables that can cause network issues. Weight of the cable being supported in full by the connector. And so on.
Cable management isn’t on most peoples minds when they think about IT, but good cable management can reduce costs, troubleshooting time and network issues. So it’s something that we take seriously.
Over the past 15 years I’ve worked with untold numbers of networks, starting with Coax, going on to Token Ring and FDDI, and now working with Cat 6 Ethernet and Fiber. And over the same amount of time I’ve used almost every cable management platform on the market. And while most of them look very nice for a while, they tend to degrade into a mess, usually because they are designed to hide the mess, not control it.
Which brings us to a recommendation, and an example of what we currently are using (and will likely use for a long time to come) – Neat-Patch.
About 7 years ago, when I was in the process of starting up a division of a Fortune 1000 company that deployed wired and wireless infrastructure around the US, I happened upon Neat-Patch. They were kind enough to come down and give us a demonstration of the product in one of our closets and quite frankly we were all blown away. While I’m not sure that the division started using them (I left that organization and went back into my full time IT position) I have used them since on several occasions and the product never fails to amaze me.
Designed to actually manage your network patch cables, rather than just hide the mess, the Neat-Patch system truly does make it easier to add, change and remove network drops. It also reduces troubleshooting time and headaches, and because of the engineering in the product keeps the network cables running running to specifications.
Here is a quick shot of the Neat-Patch solution in action:
That image shows the full network wiring layout for 96 computers. Pretty isn’t it?
Overall it’s a great product, and one that I’d like to see everyone using. On the other hand, if everyone was using it, then it could reduce the amount of troubleshooting business that we get, but I still think that it would be worth it.
Update: I understand that Neat-Patch is prepping for a product video showing management around a Cisco 6509 Switch. Having managed dozens of those beasts, and their nasty idea of cable management, I can’t wait to see their video.