Joined Nov 12, Messages 13, Not a fan of inserting switches between patch panels - you need space behind the panels to actually run and terminate the ethernet drops into the punch downs and the fat switches get in the way for the techs.
Additionally, it makes it much harder to properly stack the switches without making spaghetti in the back of your rack between stack cables, power cables, etc. The cisco stackwise cables also have limitations on distance which can screw you over in a 8 switch stack setup.
You will need vertical cable managers between each rack to properly run and hide the cables in appropriate trunks behind the covers so everything is neat and tidy. IDF room itself should locked with key card access which should eliminate need for lockable racks unless you are in some sort of co-lo environment or don't have control over the room for whatever reason.
For smaller IDF's, I'll use a single rack and put all patch panels on top 20U or so of the rack with fiber cross connects at the tippy top as they should never be touched once OTDR'd and patched. Equipment goes directly underneath. I also use 2U horizontal cable managers with covers like the one mentioned above to move cables "east to west" if I need to in a neat fashion. For MDF's, I'll do 3 racks. I've been using the "slim" CAT6 at all of my new sites as well. It's amazing how much space they save and how much neater they look.
Also pay the extra money to label every patch cord with patch panel port number along with switchport number - you or someone else will thank you later especially if you have to swap a switch due to an emergency for whatever reason. Last edited: Mar 4, Spartacus09 [H]ard Gawd. Joined Apr 21, Messages 1, I prefer 3 for the aesthetics and is still a pride to the office to this day at my last company, they replaced the solid door with a glass one and added some LED strips just to show one of the IDFs to on site customers.
However this really only works best if you're getting enough switches to make all the ports hot our office was a single port per desk to reduce cost and the VOIP phones looped through to the PCs, so that wasn't an issue. We had the tech run enough slack to be able to pull the panels out a full 90 degrees to re-punch if needed, but they haven't had to touch them since they were installed 5 years ago.
We did runs at each IDF and ran 12 fiber pairs giving us redundancy for each switch, plus a spare pair or two so it didn't matter where we placed the switches. It ran back to the MDF where we had the main distribution stack and firewalls that facilitated all the traffic anyway. For server racks my preference is in the main rack with distribution pair at the top, cable management, then the firewall pair, and storage switches in the middle.
They had had a LAN fault that effectively took out the customer services for 2 days. They now knew the problem but were amazed because the building refurb IT programme had used professional consultants etc.
I couldn't help but smile, whilst the patching looked very neat in short 48 out of 55 customer service desks were all connected to the same switch. A clear lack of assessing the requirements and determining availability requirements. We changed it to distribute over 2 switches to provide continuity.
Outage was painful for most departments but disastrous for customer services which is the public facing bit of the org. I'm not even planning to use any horizontal cable management in between the patch panel and switches. I think cat 6 cables are generally a waste unless they are terminated properly Monoprice is my go to place for patch cables. They've got 6 and 12 inch cables, I don't think I've ever seen a place offering 18 inch cables.
I just bought a bunch from fs. So far they've been just as good as their fiber transceivers and patch cables. I will certainly be buying more, and the price is right. Looks like the 1. Seckora Consulting is an IT service provider. Slim makes it easier to see das blinken lightzen. On a personal note, I prefer to run cables from the patch panel down to the switches, rather than have longer cables that go off horizontally, then down the side edge of the rack, then horizontally into the switch.
Surely 6 inch cables are just too limiting, get the longest ones you can and loop them together to keep things tidy. Our cables tend to be the long ones, but they are all pulled to the side, kept together and the other end pulled in - like you have a box of cabling at the side of the rack to store the main cable, pulling the ends out.
That's tidier in many respects as you can still get your hands in there to change them, the cables aren't in the way. This is the main reason I can think of why very short cables would be a disadvantage. Similar to what you show in your pic, but a lot more disciplined - no cable gets added that isn't first put with the bundle on the side. Don't forget to label both ends though!
They sound like the ideal solution to your problem - assuming that you can get everything 6 inches apart. If not you could just make some custom length cables that are just long enough for where things currently are.
Given that most racks are 19", this gives you enough room to run a cable from one side of the rack to the other if necessary , while reducing the slack you have to deal with. Using shorter cables is fine, until you need to recable something, or move a patch port to another switch port, then you're stringing in a new cable. Admittedly it doesn't reduce slack nearly as much as 6" cables would, but the down-the-road flexibility is much handier, IMHO.
I did this with the last rack deployment I did, going as far as to get shorter power cables and color-coded Cat5 for DRAC, Public vs private network, etc. The back of the rack looks clean, simple, and awesome.
The main downside with a cable as short as 6" is that you may end up with problems if you use it to directly connect two interfaces, but for a patch between a panel and a switch or two panels , it should be just fine.
Your basic problem is a complete lack of a methodical approach to cabling. The use of such absurdly long patch leads, as shown in the photo, just makes it near impossible to be properly organised. Before you touch another cable sit yourself down and give serious though to the result you want, rather than how to fix what you have.
If you don't have a final objective everything you do to that cabling will still end up messy and hard to work with. One of the most important things to consider is how you are going to know which cable connects to which end points, without having to trace that cable.
I use a MS Access database for that, because it's easy to use and I can produce reports in any convenient format. Several of those reports are printed out and hung on the rack. Any cabling changes get updated on those sheets and later entered into the database. As to the cables themselves, I prefer to make my own to whatever length is called for.
If you don't want to do that I suggest getting a bunch of different lengths and using the appropriate one each time. There's certainly nothing wrong with 6 inch cables in and of itself, if that's appropriate to the situation in which they are used. Sign up to join this community. The best answers are voted up and rise to the top. Stack Overflow for Teams — Collaborate and share knowledge with a private group. Create a free Team What is Teams? Learn more. Any thoughts on 6 inch ethernet patch cables?
Ask Question. Short and sweet. An selection of high quality short cables for patching between effects pedals FX and in patch bays.
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