Cable management!!

[awilderbeast]

Just wondering what everyone else is doing, inside the closets, cabinets and DC. unfortunately none of our racks have vertical space or management bars.

so weve been trying a fwe things out recently

weve tried these:-
http://www.netstoredirect.com/cable-management/235240-19-cabinet-cable-dump-panels.html
not great, theres no where to put excess cables and the little slots for cables often cant fit two cables in becuase the slots are soo close to the ports.

these:-
http://www.netstoredirect.com/cable-management/121815-prism-4-ring-cable-managment-bars.html?gclid=CjwKEAjwzuisBRClgJnI4_a96zwSJACAEZKeIs7xJnUEf3a8vEV4B_EKNFyzNIjywrBMkZFyehcDqRoCJcbw_wcB#/u_size-1u
everyone's tried these, pretty useless i think unless your willing to make all your own cables, even then, your never gonna fit 24 or 48 cables into those little rings

i want to try these
http://www.techcare.co.uk/store/neat-patch-cable-management-cabinet-rack?search=neat%20patch
they look pretty good, pricey though!

Anyone else have any good products for mgmt they use?

Thanks

[Nerm]

For me personally the most important tool for cable management is using the correct length cable.

[deanwebb]

We use proper racks and Panduit and hire a lot of anal-retentive types to keep the DC clean.

Our lab environment looks like a bunch of engineers used it for a lab environment, however. Cable management there is finding unattached copper lines and tossing them into the box.

[that1guy15]

We deploy all IDF racks with Panduit NCMH2 in between each patch panel to eat up any left-over slack.

The biggest key is proper cable length. We still deploy pre-made cables in rack build-outs but every run should only be a 3 or 5 ft run. So there is little slack to work with. Throw a 10Ft cable in the rack and its not going to work right no matter what manager you have.

[awilderbeast]

when you guys say correct cable length you mean you go to the nearest metre 1, 3, 5, 7 etc or do you make them all?

[that1guy15]

Both.

For closets and remote sites we do pre-build 100%. For the amount of port provisioning and moves my front line techs dont have the time to build a new cable every time. Plus there would be more quality issues than its worth. Each of them is expected to keep 3 and 5ft patch with them at all times.

Anything in the DC is custom length with no slack. Usually the DC is large deployments all at once with little change or one-offs. Usually large bundles are ran at once and a single rack is terminated at the same time. You dont want to chew up space in the DC with a lot of horizontal management.

But this debate can go multiple ways depending on the company and teams point of view.

[Otanx]

We stock cable at each foot from 3 to 10 ft. We also stock 15, 20, 25 ft lengths. Anything else we custom make. Like that1guy15 said every shop is different. Our DC deployments are small (three or four servers) regular (at least twice a week), and short notice(same day turn around). For us making custom all the time would suck. If I could get to the point of deploying a rack at a time then we could go with custom cables, but that isn't going to happen in this environment.

Our campus stuff is a mess. Usually cabled with stuff that was pulled from the DC. Different lengths typically way to long. One day we will clean this up. Probably a week before management announces we are moving to new offices.

-Otanx

[Nerm]

Kind of the same here. We stock 1,3,7,10,15,25,50 (in feet). If an odd length is needed say 5ft or 12ft we custom make it. For larger deployments (eg in DC's) the installer techs terminate at needed length as this is normally large bundles all ran together. We are a consultant so we find ourselves making a lot of custom lengths to fit customer needs.