5 Tips for Avoiding Server Room Spaghetti

5 Tips for Avoiding Server Room Spaghetti

5 Tips for Avoiding Server Room Spaghetti

Does your server room look like it should come with a side of garlic bread? Don’t get us wrong, we love spaghetti just as much as the next person, but it has no place in a server room. Server room cable clutter is not only an eyesore, but it can cause a variety of issues such as safety hazards, decreased airflow, damage to equipment, and troubleshooting frustrations. Save the spaghetti for Italian night and keep it out of your server room with these five tips:    

1. Bundle ‘em up. Cable management is the most important part to keeping your server room or data center spaghetti-free. Bundling your cables with Velcro cable ties or plastic zip ties will reduce clutter and help you to easily identify a group of cables. Velcro ties cost a bit more than plastic ones, but are easier to reuse. Bundling cables will also help keep clutter off the floor, preventing tripping hazards that could seriously hurt someone or cause damage to the cables.  

2. Keep like with like. When bundling cables, it is also important to keep similar cables together. Whenever possible, keep your power cables away from your network cables. Power cables cause Electromagnetic Interference (EMI) and network slowdown.  

3. Color code cables. Color coding your cables doesn’t just make your server room look like a beautiful piece of art; it can actually save a lot of time during maintenance and troubleshooting. Make sure each color has a purpose. For example, you can use yellow for servers, blue for data, green for phones, purple for printers, and red for switches. You can create your own color coding scheme, just make sure it is followed throughout the server room.    

4. Label, label, label. Labeling your cables will help everyone out. It is the easiest way to avoid headaches and frustrations during troubleshooting. Label both ends of the cables so that you can always identify end points. You have many options when it comes to labels such as heat-shrink labels, laser cable labels, thermal cable labels, and dot matrix cable labels. For more information on labeling options, check out our Cable Labels article.  

5. Use the right sized cables. Use only the length of cable that you need. Don’t use long cable where short cables will work. Excess cable contributes to the hanging spaghetti mess, and can cause unnecessary bends in the cables or tripping hazards.  

Take your time in making these changes, and soon enough you’ll have a prize-worthy looking server room! Now, after writing this, we suddenly have an odd craving for Italian food…  

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