Web Hosting Talk : Web Hosting Main Forums : Hosting Security and Technology : Network cable labeling

[WLHosting]

I am in the process of expanding my rack of servers and the cabling has not been well labeled over the years. With some servers having more than 2 network cables connecting the amount of cabling in the rack is getting quite a bit. My question to you is what kind of cable labeling schemes do you employ on your racks? Labeling both ends of the cable? Use different colored cabling for different purposes/traffic? (ie. Gray cabling for all server to server communications and then blue cabling for all internet facing communications?)

I just want to find some "standard" that may be out there so that if I contract/hire people to do work with the servers the cabling can easily be dealt with without confusion.

[hhw]

We use a colour scheme of:
blue = regular
white = backup
red (or fiber) = critical
green = KVM over IP
yellow = serial console
black = internal

We usually have one endpoint on the first line, the other endpoint on the next line, and the labels on both ends.

[WLHosting]

Do you have a standard you use for your label's? Do you label your cables with switch port number at both ends? Rack U number and switch port number?

[hhw]

We normally go by:
<device/server name>
<switch> <port>
on both ends.

We don't bother with Rack or U in our labelling convention, as our customer access switches will be unique to a particular cabinet, and we use switch/port as our primary key. Our servers are also all labelled, and they're easy enough to spot within a cabinet, especially as we tend to partition our cabinets into 5U groups of the same server type.

[WebSliceNZChris]

One thing is for sure, you should label both ends. It makes it a whole lot easier to find that other end without taking out the whole cable.

[Mekhu]

I'm more interested in seeing some pictures!

I remember the mini DC our College had... what a mess!

[NoSupportLinuxHostin]

I've always labeled both ends using a small hand held label maker. You can pick one up at nearly any office supply store.

The other thing that has helped a lot is switching from normal rack mounted servers to rack mounted blade centers. With blade centers, there are far fewer power and network cables to deal with. If you are planning to add a lot of servers, consider using blade centers instead of the usual 1U stuff.

[Hydro_Host]

You could use different coloured cabling also. I mean as well as labelling, this may just cut down on the amount of information you need to put on the labels.

Or number each cable at each end and then refer to a key when trying to find one?

[hostechsupport]

Hello,

You can use numbering system on the cabling or you can also color schemes to diffretiate the cables as per their use.

[WLHosting]

I have decided on putting in different colored cables based on function. (iSCSI traffic from SAN = red, Dell Remote Access Cards = orange, External connections = gray and a few others)

I have still to determine a good naming convention for the label. The cables are currently only labeled at 1 end (which was dumb of the original installer which was possibly me several years ago ). One thing I am running into is many of our servers have upwards of 6 NICs and trying to determine a good naming scheme to distinguish between all of those.

Considering using at a minimum <switch>-<port> on the label.

Currently we have 2x 1U servers, 2x 2U servers, 2x 2U UPS, 2x 3U SAN, 1x KVM over IP and then 2x network switches at the top.