3 ms·
Wide racks, structured cabling, cable combs, "real" overhead tray, clever lighting. Buy multiple exact lengths of cables instead of using service loops. Use the
by oakwhiz 4y ago
Wide racks, structured cabling, cable combs, "real" overhead tray, clever lighting. Buy multiple exact lengths of cables instead of using service loops. Use the right kind of PDUs to minimize power cable lengths.
You can order custom racks and have them use any metal or paints that you want.
Hire good electricians, get them to bend hard metallic conduit instead of flexible or plastic, have it bundled instead of just surface mounted. Additionally have an engineer draw up all of the conduit plans ahead of time instead of just letting the electricians figure out something random.
Edit: Buy loopback SFP modules and put them in all unused ports on switches and servers, then set the port on a VLAN and/or IP address that doesn't go anywhere. Then use multicast pings to make it blink.
Edit 2: Buy more switches to do this kind of thing if you don't have enough switches to make it look interesting. You could use bunches of 48 short 6 inch cables to make a routing protocol lab on several pieces of 10+ year old equipment, and then have beautiful blinking lights all over the place.
- the_biot 4y agoI think this is bad advice, frankly. Such things are not unusual, non-tech suits always want blinkenlights and such, because they think it'll impress prospective customers. The stories I could tell, datacenters like circus acts. The key is to keep the blinkencrap away from the real network/servers/patch panels, because those things have to actually work at all times, and it's your neck if it doesn't. When you start adding extra switches and whatnot to the network just because they look and blink nice, you're actually adding points of failure into the network, stuff that can affect your network for whatever reason if something goes wrong. I would advise either outright refusing to do it, or adding completely unconnected bling like rsync's comment lists -- expensive junk that serves no purpose except look flashy. But just never connect that crap to a production network.