First Server Room Cabling Job

[tobsmonster2]

Hi all,

Hope you're all having a lovely holiday period .

I was asked to re-cable a couple cabinets and re-rack some of the servers at one of my companies clients (pics below).

This was my first time doing cabling outside of a gaming PC and I'd like to hear what you all think .

A couple of things to note about the job:
- I'd never seen the site before, and had to make do with the cables we had on-site.
- The red cables required 1 to 1 patching, so I had to note where they went into on the switch and on the patchpanel and make sure they went back the same way.
- I was allowed to move the servers and firewall around, but the patchpanels and switches had to stay as they were.

...and finally:

Also, it took around 12 hours to get everything done including noting the port numbers, preparing lengths of cable, removing doors, patching etc... Is that a reasonable time to complete a job like this? I don't want to get into a bad habit of doing this slowly if I should be doing it faster .

Best wishes,

tobs.

 

[tobsmonster2]

Thanks for all the positive comments guys it's greatly appreciated!

@matthab
I was with two colleagues, but they were cracking on with the servers while I did the patching work. As you can see in second picture, the guys who'd been here previously didn't actually rack any of the servers and instead installed a tray and stacked all the servers on top of one another .

Only managed to get labels on the cables coming from the servers in the end . Just didn't have enough time for the rest.

@mrbell1984
They had this set up in a college I worked in last year and I've got to say it's probably one of the best cabling set ups I've come across. The only downside I saw was that the bunches of short cables meant some of the cabs could never be closed .

Thanks again for all the comments guys and Merry Christmas.

 

[tobsmonster2]

This is the main thing, you need to be able to swap any device without unplugging another (easily preferably). Try not to cable across other devices...

The top 'switches' are actually one single device (fairly old model IIRC) so it doesn't matter too much in this situation .
As each server had two NIC's, the most important thing was making sure each one got connected to a different 'module' on the switch to give some redundancy.
I will bare that in mind though, because if I'm honest I really only went for what I thought would look cleanest.