The Importance of Proper Cable Management

An efficient cable management system should be an important part of your data center’s infrastructure. In fact, how your cable management system is designed can have a direct impact on several day-to-day activities like network performance, transmission speeds, and power consumption. Therefore, choosing the components that go into the building of your cable management system is too important to be overlooked.

Here are a few reasons why you need to adopt an efficient cable management system today.

Ease of Use

If your employees have to work with haphazardly tangled cables to make any sense out of them, it can directly affect the time being spent by them trying to perform any activity in your data center. This leads to decreased efficiency, even for simple tasks such as changing hard drives. Investing in a high-quality cable management system will provide your employees with easy access to not only the cables but the devices they are connected to.

You can color code the power, data, and ethernet cables to further improve the speed with which menial tasks are carried out in your data center.

Fire Safety

Improperly managed cables can increase the probability of sparks occurring between them – this immediately poses a fire hazard risk for your very expensive data center, containing business-critical information. Similarly, if someone trips on a bundle of cables and suddenly yanks a few of them out of their sockets, it can also lead to a fire that can definitely damage your devices and potentially damage your entire data center.

An important part of cable management is to ensure no cables are left lying on the ground or overlapping with each other in close proximity.

Troubleshooting

While troubleshooting a malfunctioning electronic device, one of the first steps is to ensure that the problem is not with the data transfer cable. If your employees have to browse through a dozen cables to identify the right one and then test it, it does not make business sense to add several hours of additional work on to your resources.

The ability to spot the right cable immediately and perform tests on it can help you save valuable time and this is one of the most important reasons why a cable management system should be in place for your data center.

Air Damming

When airflow within a data center is blocked between installed equipment and tangled cables, it is called air damming. This phenomenon prevents hot air from being expelled out through exhausts and cold air from flowing in. Over time, air damming can result in increased temperature inside the data center which can directly harm the equipment present inside. Irrespective of the cooling solution you have invested in for your data center, air damming has the ability to bring them to waste. High temperatures also lead to performance issues including hardware failure.

Cable management effectively removes the possibility of air damming from affecting the temperature in your data center. Simply redesigning the cabling efficiently can help you save thousands of dollars in damage.

At Hardy Racks, we have products that will aid you in building cable management systems that are efficient, compact and cost-effective. Our fiber raceways are the best-in-class solution for properly managing the highly demanding fiber cables. To know more about fiber raceways and our other cable management solutions, get in touch with us now.