In my flat, I have a terrible problem of tripping over wires and stumbling across a broken wire after fishing out from underneath the vacuum cleaner. It may sound a little over the top but without good cable management one is likely to face a very nasty injury sooner rather than later. There is much to say about the fact that many people like me, tend to very lazily vacuum over the wires rather than pick them and move them out the way. In the end, one finds they have to buy a new set of wires.
When setting up your system in the living such as the television and surround system, good cable management can come in the form of simple moves. These include such things as moving the wire behind the television unit; however, even this can prove to become a problem when you end up finding yourself piling up the wires losing track of which wire connects to what wire. These may seem like simple instructions to the layperson, but it is an extremely important part of helping when it comes to trouble shooting.
It is a good idea to use a simple wire tidy for these, labelling each cable and use a cabinet to keep them hidden. If you have wires running across the room, it is a good idea to either have them under the carpet out of the way of people walking over them or cover them up if they running along the wall. Keeping wires tidy and managed at home is relatively easy compared to keeping them in order in server rooms.
Large businesses, data centres and organisation tend to have server rooms, which are laden with computers and plenty of wires. When many wires are tangled up together, the weight of the cables can be extremely heavy resulting in some of the connectors being pulled and can even short out. This could lead to your network connectivity to slow down or even fail, which is not a good thing if you are in a large company. In places like this, cable management is needed to keep the servers running smoothly and being able to resolve problems that may occur, quickly and efficiently.
Network cables are more difficult to keep on top of, managing these cables will require knowing which cable to take out and leave. Using an Ethernet switch for your servers and use a wire tidy to keep them separate from each server used. Label each cable at the end and connect them onto your Ethernet switch so you can keep track of what each cable does. Using conduits and cabinets will help you to keep most of these cables hidden, which is good for keeping the server rooms looking neat and tidy.
Unfortunately, server rooms will always need more cables so there is no working around this, unless you lose some connection with certain servers – not recommended. However, you can easily keep them managed and in order to avoid loose connectivity and disruptions to server connections.
Anna Stenning is an expert on cable management having worked and seen how this was practised in many companies.
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