Video: Cabling A Rack at SoftLayer

Good cable management is essential to maintaining order in a data center. What does this process look like? The data center team at SoftLayer provides a closer look. "Each of the network switches we use in a rack has at least 48 ports," writes Kevin Hazard at the SoftLayer blog. "Now consider that each rack has two public network switches, two private network switches and one out-of-band management network switch that need to be connected to every SoftLayer server in the rack. That’s 240 pre-measured network cables that need to be labeled and routed to specific heights in each rack … without getting tangled and knotted up (see: behind your TV or under your computer desk). The cabling process is so precise that if a single cable is out of place, the zip-tie on an entire bundle will be cut, and the process is started from scratch." Here's a video of the rack cabling process, which runs about 4 minutes.

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