Tag Archives: cable management

How to Choose the Proper Cabling Pathway?

Just as the old saying goes: it’s the little things that make the biggest impact. This is especially true when it comes to design a data center—there are so many factors to consider during the process, among which the proper cabling pathway construction only possesses a small part yet matters significantly. Data center designers are always aware of that multiple products must work together to ensure a successful pathway and cable management. This article will take a review of the commonly seen cabling pathway types.

What Is Cabling Pathway?

Cabling pathways allow the placement of data center trunk cables and cross-connect cables between racks and cabinets. Cabling pathway comes into two forms: overhead pathway and under floor pathway. Both of them are designed to accommodate all standards-compliant cabling and allow for necessary changes later. In other words, cabling pathway should support the weight of cables in the initial installation and also facilitate additional cables in the future. Which helps ensure robust pathways that respond well to cable work over the facility’s life cycle.

cabling pathway

Cabling Pathway types Overview

Cabling pathway types come in a dazzle array of styles, in this section, we’ll illustrate some of them that widely used in work areas, wiring closets and for horizontal and backbone cable runs.

Conduit

Conduits are pipes that cable is placed in and pulled through, and it can be metallic or nonmetallic, rigid or flexible. They run from the telecommunications room to the work area outlets in the floor, walls, or columns of a building. To ensure that enough conduit be installed, it is recommended that the conduit would better be only 40 percent full by your current cable needs, or 60 percent full to the maximum. Which leaves you space for future growth.

conduit

Cable Trays

Cable tray serves as an alternative cabling pathway component to conduit, which can be installed as distribution system to route and support your cables. Typically, cable tray is open and equipped with sides that allow cable to be laid within the tray’s entire length. It is ideal to use cable tray to manage a large number of horizontal cable runs, due to their greater accessibility when it comes to maintenance and troubleshooting, as well as its ability to accommodate change.

cable tray

Basket Tray

A basket tray serves as a cable tray that designed for light duty applications, which is lightweight and easy to install. Unlike ladder rack installation, to properly install a basket tray, certain level of experience is needed. Many of the accessories that accompany ladder racks also accompany basket trays, to ensure proper bend radius and a proper transition to the equipment rack.

basket cable tray

Underfloor Cable Tray

An underfloor cable tray is used primarily in data centers. It resembles much as overhead support pathway types. However, when using under floor cable tray systems, the air space may be a plenum air space, so all cable and patch cables would need to be plenum to ensure proper air flow.

underfloor cable tray

Ladder Racks

A ladder rack is made of tubular steel and comes in sizes from 6’’ to 36’’ wide. The installation of a ladder rack is simple and requires little trade experience. Ladder rack comes with many accessories such as 90-degree bends, waterfalls and cable retaining posts. These accessories allow the routing of cable without damage.

ladder rack

Raceways

Raceways are special types of conduits used for surface mounting horizontal cables. They are usually pieced together in a modular fashion with vendors providing connectors that do not exceed the minimum bend radius. Raceways are mounted on the outside of a wall in places where cable is not easily installed inside the wall. They are commonly used on walls made of brick or concrete where no telecommunications conduit has been installed.

cable raceway

Installation Considerations for Cabling Pathway

With the purpose of supporting the current needs as well as future growth, several essential factors should better be considered while designing and installing cable pathway.

  • Overhead and underfloor cabling pathway should be installed in a matrix type method, allowing cables to be routed from point to point anywhere in the data center.
  • When installing any types of cabling pathway, grounding and bonding are rather vital. Make sure that all racks, cabinets, and cabling support components are properly bonded and the system is grounded.
  • Always leave room for future growth. All cable tray and ladder rack should allow room to accommodate at least 50% growth after the initial install.
  • Be sure the heaviest cable in on the bottom of the tray or separated from the lighter cables, and separate the copper cables from the fiber cables if possible.

separate fiber and copper in cabling pathway

  • Avoid mounting any types of cabling pathway in locations that block access to other equipment inside and outside the racks.
  • Avoid routing pathways with copper cables near equipment, which may generate high levels of electrometric interference. Avoid areas around power cords, florescent lights, building electrical cables and fire prevention components.
Conclusion

The knowledge concerning different styles of cabling pathway lies the foundation of proper installation of data center pathway. Choosing proper cabling pathway type makes it easier to perform cable-related work and maintenance later. Make your decision on the basis of your unique working condition and environments, and do not forget to account for the factors mentioned below while perform cabling pathway installation.

How to Achieve Cable Management in Rack System?

Currently, most data centers and server rooms feature high density and large capacity, in which the devices and switches are installed on the rack to achieve better performance and scalability. The accelerating capacity of the network, therefore, brings a parallel growth of discrete data communication and power cabling. Apparently, to manage these massive data and cables within a confined and tightly-spaced rack environment is quite difficult. Improper cable management would result in cable damage and failure, which directly lead to data transmission errors, performance issues, and system downtime. So, in this article, let’s talk about cable management in-rack cabling systems.

Why Is Proper Cable Management Important?

Just as we have mentioned previously, poor cable management can cause a series of network problems. The following are the common ones.

Signal interference and crosstalk due to improper placement of data and power cables—Data and power cables running close to each other in parallel groups or in loops may create electromagnetic interference (EMI) due to induction. EMI can cause errors in data transmission over these cables. Therefore, power cables should be necessarily separated from data cables on the opposite side of the rack to reduce the chances of EMI.

Rack-mounted components blocked by improperly routed cables—Having the access to servers and other network components housed within an enclosure is critical. Due to the high-density cabling of these applications, it is important to ensure that cabling does not block components, racks or rails. Fiber optic cables encounter additional challenges since they are more fragile. One should prevent other cables or components from exerting tension on fiber cables and avoid damage. Cable ties can be used to secure fiber optic cables. Try not to route fiber optic cable around corners within the enclosure.

nylon cable tie

Cooling and airflow restriction resulting from poor cable placement—It is important to make sure that cables are not placed in such a way that may restrict airflow from components inside the enclosure. Obstructed air movement due to blocked vents and fans lead to component overheating and possible thermal shutdown or even equipment damage.

Cable Management in Server Cabinets

At the very beginning, we should know that data centers generally contain two basic types of equipment enclosures: server cabinets and network cabinets.

Server cabinets house mostly active equipment in the form of blade chassis or stackable servers. The first step of preparing cable management for the enclosure is to determine the capacity needed for cabling. Calculate the number and type of connections per server and the total number of servers expected to be housed in the cabinet, then to determine where the cable needs to be routed.

Cabling Requirements Unique to Server Cabinets

Server cabinets typically have the patching for the devices occupying the rear-facing portion of the cabinet, along with power connections. This requires management of both network and power cords. The copper connections and fiber connections are served from one vertical bay, while power connections are addressed from another bay.

A mounting area is provided where vertical mounted power strips are used. In instances where power and network cords have to cross from one side of the cabinet to the other, the use of horizontal cable managers can be deployed to provide distinct paths. Noted that power and network cords should be housed in separate cable managers. The ability to house these connections in the vertical patching space assures that cables are dressed in such a manner that they do not block exhaust fans on the rear of the servers.

cable management panel/rack

Cable Management in Network Cabinets

Network cabinets house network switches and patch panels. These cabinets have the highest concentration of cabling in the data center, making patch cord management even more critical and requiring both horizontal and vertical cable management. Due to the high concentration of cabling in these cabinets, a typical installation would use 19’’ patch panel and standard fiber enclosure mounted either at the top of the switch cabinet or in an adjacent cabinet when the cabinet houses multiple switches.

Cabling Requirements Unique to Network Cabinets

The majority of the patching connections typically occur at the front of the cabinet. For in row switching or top of rack switching, the back side rails populated with horizontal cable managers allow patching within the cabinet and down the row.

Typically, the cabinets would be configured in a manner using rack mount patch panels and cable managers along with vertically mounted cable managers to provide pathways for patch cords transcending from top of rack patch panels to bottom of rack switches.

Tips for Specifying and Applying Cable Management Products

Start with proper planning—Once you have determined the amount of cabling and connections required, you can decide where the cables need to be routed within the cabinet. This allows you to select the proper cable management components to secure the wiring and connections. It is important to make sure that there is adequate space within the rack for the amount of cabling. Accurately establishing the amount of cabling and connections needed ahead of deployment will greatly increase the chance of a successful installation.

Keep growth in mind—Growth in data center environment is a necessity. Planning ahead for installing additional cabinets, servers and network components should be taken into consideration even as you are in the first phase of your rack installation. Which makes it easier to integrate additional racks and components in the future. Poor planning in terms of future changes often results in cable spaghetti that presented in many data centers.

Follow industry standards—Industry guidelines such as ANSI/TIA and ISO/IEC, as well as any federal, state or local regulations regarding cabling, should always be followed. It not only assures code compliance but promises a safe, failure-free installation that will minimize system downtime and data errors. A standards-based cabling system provides the best combination of reliability today and the ability to change and reconfigure in the future. Standards provide a written foundation for establishing a sound infrastructure and guidelines for maintaining a high level of cable performance.

Summary

As we can see, poor cable management could lead to additional cost and time, while proper management contributes to reduce signal interference, improve maintenance and serviceability. To achieve successful cable management, professional skills and experiences are needed. And with the help of management products like cable manager and cable tie, you can even manage cables more efficiently according to specific layout requirements.