16
CABLING
Cable volume
solutions
Oli Barrington, Managing
Director UK & Ireland, R&M
www.rdm.com
Practical solutions for dealing with
high cable volumes in cabinets as
demand increases
There are many factors currently driving the uptake of
higher density cabinets. The cost of colocation space and
the cost and availability of space for on-premises data
centres and server rooms are driving businesses towards
getting more compute and storage out of each cabinet
footprint. This trend has been helped by advances made by
hardware manufacturers in reducing the power consumption
of their devices and the array of available options on the
market for removing heat from cabinets. Today, power and
heat considerations are less often the limiting factors when
it comes to density inside the cabinet. This leaves physical
connectivity as a potential inhibitor to increases in density.
Density tends to go hand in hand with complexity. HD
connectivity in cabinets brings all sorts of challenges. Larger
numbers of cables can impact airflow and allow heat to
build up. In the worst case, complete cessation of services
and equipment damage may occur. Outlets may be so close
together that unplugging cables becomes a challenge.
Traditional latching mechanisms on copper and fibre
connectors are impractical; manufacturers need to overcome
this with patch cords designed specifically for use in high-
density environments.
A well-designed HD solution should help meet increasing
demand with a pay-as-you-grow approach. It should be
easy to install additional connections without significantly
disrupting existing services. Performance optimisation
should be a given. What’s more, as so many HD systems
connect critical services, risk mitigation should be an
essential aspect of design.
Practical considerations
In today’s data centres the number of physical connections
in each compute cabinet can, in some cases, exceed 200. In
switch cabinets, there can even be many more. When you
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