A Tidy, Maintainable Cabinet Wiring Methodology?

mawhin asks: "I've seen a couple of articles highlighting readers' favourite tidy/untidy cabling, and conversations along the lines of 'I always do my cabling *real* tidy' / 'yeah but how can you change stuff when everything is zip tied down'. 'Use velcro not zip ties' is obviously a good tip, but what I'd really like to know is how you all do it. My particular situation involves multiple racks of switches next to racks of patch panels. What methodology would you recommend for installation and ongoing change to ensure that stuff is tidy enough to be able to trace cable; isn't so tight the you can't re-patch without stripping big chunks of cabling out; and the arrangement doesn't inevitably deteriorate?"

Cable management

[jcdick1]

Where I used to work, they would stack their MDF (Main Distribution Frame) full of patch panels, 4U each and 11 per frame. Each panel would host 144 ports. Front and back came to over 3000 pairs of fibre coming into each frame. This was done without any horizontal cable management. Well-spaced cable management, both horizontal and vertical, is key to a maintainable bulk cabling system. We finally migrated all of that to new MDF, with 2U cable management between every two patch panels and dropped the port density per panel from 144 to 72. That made 2U of cable management for every 8U of patch panel space. This made it very easy to trace and pull fibre without unintentionally impacting other fibre paths. With good cable management products in a well-thought out arrangement, you may not even have to use ties. Even in your switch cabinets. All of this fibre ran to several fully-populated McData FC switches, and we would put cable management both above and below each switch. This would allow us to run the cable in, through the management, and either straight down or straight up to the appropriate switch port. We didn't even need ties.

Entropy says:

[Illserve]

Whether a wiring job eventually deteriorates or not is up to you, not the setup you've chosen. If you have the kind of personality and drive to keep it clean, you will, no matter what setup you use.

There is no magic bullet arrangement of cables and velcro that is immune to entropy.

Re:Cable management

[sam1am]

Good cable management products are a good first step. I like Panduit's.

Label each side of any cable with a "wire run number" and document these religiously. If you have someone else doing the work for you, check out ranges of wire numbers to them.

We use numbers with a two-letter series and then 4 digits.

For your initial install, put AA0001 at position 1, and work upwards. While obviously, this won't be the case for everything, for larger bundles, its easier to deal with.

Finally, label the patch points clearly. ADC makes great designations strips with plastic windows.