Avoiding Spaghetti

Spaghetti is great on a plate with a nice Bolognese sauce. It isn't good in a data center. (See "Glossary" for a good Bolognese sauce recipe.) It is all too common for the network cabling in data centers to get tangled up on top of and under the floor due to bad or non-existent cabling schemes. Keep the following suggestions in mind:

• Use the correct length of Cat5 or fiber cables to go from point to point. This avoids the need to coil or otherwise bundle excess cable.

• Use cable ties to keep cables in ordered bundles.

• Route cables, whenever possible, under the tiles of the raised floors, preferably in cable trays. Don't lay cable on the ground where it can block air flow and create dust traps.

• Label each cable at both ends so that the floor doesn't need to be raised to follow cable routing. (See the following section, "Labeling and Color Coding.")

• Avoid messy cable routing on the floor as shown in the following figure. This creates several hazards and liability issues.

Figure 9-4. Spaghetti on the Floor