Rack Patchbays / Switches

[awsedit]

Hello -

I'm wiring some new racks and this is what I want to do.

Have a 24port patchbay mounted on the rear of an equip rack with premade patchcords run from the servers to the patchbay. Then have a 24 cable bundle from that patchbay run to the rack that contains all of the switches and terminate the bundle to it's twin patchbay mounted in front of the rack. From there, simply use patchcords to connect the ports in the bay to the switch. All in all, a clean installation on both ends.

There's no issue with doing it this way, correct? Some guy tells me that this setup will give me too many data collisons, but that makes absolutely no sense.

Opinions?

 

[Jtodd]

No issues, as long as your bundle of cable between patch panels is not too tight. I'll probably doing something similar.


Justin T. Clausen
Physical Layer Implementation
California State University, Monterey Bay

 

[tweege]

also, cables should not run parallel to the same one for very long. by that i mean being able to finger-trace a cable all the way through the run. will cause interference between them.

thanks, tim

 

[robertjo24]

Tweege????
Why do you think running the cables in this mannor will cause interferance over long runs w/particular cables runing prrallell?

 

[franklin97355]

It's called alien crosstalk and it is becomming a bigger issue as speeds increase over UTP cable.

 

[telecomtekperson]

So, I cant run my cables across the ceiling together? I must seperate them? How much distance between them?

 

[franklin97355]

Hope you are using some sort of wire management and not just running the wires on the ceiling. The don't need to be seperated just not run in tight neat PARALLEL bundles. Just grab the wires and throw them in a tray or hang them from hooks but don't make pretty bundles and you should be OK.

 

[awsedit]

So, regardless of what cables used, at GbE speeds, it is reccommended not to make the bundels of cable look 'pretty and neat'? Back to my original post, I have 5 racks that I want to run 24 line bundles back to the main rack - so in theroy, by the time it gets to rack 4, I'm going to have a 96 line 4" trunk of cables. I couldn't think of doing it any other way then 'pretty'. These racks are adjacent to eachother, so we talking about runs 20-30' max.

 

[fs483]

Are you going to have up to 24 servers per rack ? Unless all your servers are 2U or less, it will be pretty hard to fit that many devices into a single rack.

 

[awsedit]

Multiple NICs per machine, spares, etc. I"ve learned that you can never have too many

 

[fs483]

Yeah that's true, but I rarely go that far ! I normally use only 1 nic per server. My servers are all 5U and each server has a 2U ups so I can never get that many devices into a single rack. Good to plan ahead but it sometimes costs a lot for nothing.