Does Your Data Closet/Room Look Like This?
We in the cabling business are governed by standards called TIA/EIA standards (Telecommunications Industry Association /Electronic Industries Association).
The items in the picture fail to meet standards in a number of ways.
- Cables should enter a closet in an organized entry system not from all directions.
- Cables should have some support from entry into the room to the rack. These cable do not have any support.
- Standards require a maintenance loop in the closet. These cables do not have that.
- When zip ties are used they cannot be so thigh as to change the shape of the cable. These zip ties are too tight.
- Cables cannot touch any pipes anywhere. These cables are lying on a sprinkler system pipe. (Violates Fire Code)
- Copper patch cables and fiber jumpers are intermingled and fiber could be damaged when working with the cooper cables.
- Fiber trays are on lower part of rack and we put ours at top of rack to keep fiber and cooper from being run together.
- Racks are not grounded and NEC (National Electric Code) plus TIA/EIA standards require grounding.
- Did not use wire organizer for patch cables. Cables do not have support and weight of cable puts stress on connectors and patch panel.
- None of the cables are labelled. The only way to find the other end of a cable in a room is to tone all cables.
Let’s face it, the room is ugly, but worse it’s prone to causing you data problems and makes fixing them even harder.
Things not out of standard that we would do different.
- On the rack we would have 48 ports of patch panels a wire organizer and a switch then repeat the process. If two racks were necessary, we would have routed some cables to the second rack.
- The fiber drawers would be at the top of the racks.
- We would have used shorter patch cables run in the wire organizer.
- We would have cable tray around the room for support and the maintenance loop.
- We would have used Velcro in place of zip ties
- The cables and patch panel would be labelled.
