(Server Room) Cleanliness Is Next To Godliness

Unorganized server room cabling is the Gordian Knot of IT.

Ask any techie and they'll say one of the top nuisances in the network world would be a poorly-wired patch panel.   Like the proverbial snowball rolling down a hill, a lame wire job takes on a life of its own and soon reaches a point-of-no-return down the path to ruin.   When the inevitable network "issue" arises and you have to source that one cable causing you agita, it can become impossible to figure it out.   I mean, seriously, would you be able to wade through this?

Unlike Alexander The Great, I am not conquering the world - I just want to troubleshoot a problem quickly :-)

Advantages to a cleanly-wired cabinet:

1. It allows you to physically label the important stuff - like where your routers, firewalls and switches interconnect.   Ever try to figure out an outage with no knowledge of what plugs in where?   The only knot I'd want to see is a hangman's noose.    Labeling end-to-end makes this a painless process.
2. You can virtually label all your equipement's ports.   I now can see if a particular user is downloading The Lord Of The Rings trilogy on my monitoring system (ipMonitor) or on the Cisco devices that run stuff.    This also makes bandwidth reports less mysterious.
3. Sourcing a root cause becomes many times faster.   No more wading through a tangle of CAT-6 wiring.   And you can SEE the patch panel and switch/router/firewall ports - unlike the cheap seats in center at the new Stadium.
4. It looks like you care about your server room.
5. Your management will think you sprinkle magic pixie dust around.

Once you've taken the devil out of the details, it will look like this (below).    This took me about five hours and cost me about three minutes of downtime as I figured out where everything was plugged into on the server side.   I now have every port documented and labeled on my monitoring/reporting system and on the network devices.   When something important goes offline I can quickly diagnose if it's due to a connectivity issue in a minute or so.