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Sweet another drive size to add to my drobo http://bit.ly/dyZBel

In the last few blogs we discussed the need for proper cable management, whether you are deploying a new data center or cleaning up an existing one. In this posting, we will continue in that same vein and discuss the need for the proper labeling of the cable plant for servers, network devices and storage devices. Labeling is just as important as properly strung glass, copper and power. Labeling for the cables is only the beginning. One needs to ensure that all devices in the environment are clearly labeled so they can be identifiable to operations and sys-admins in order to make maintenance activities as painless as possible.

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One thing that always irritated me, as a prior end-user is none of the vendors every really had any real answers around cable and label management, at least not something you didn’t have to pay for a professional services engagement on. It was something I had to develop primarily on my own based on what worked for my company and the data-centers I was working in. Someone once told me “Anything worth doing is worth doing well”, this holds just as true for the cabling aspect of any data-center.

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Everyone, out there today seems to be talking about standards, but mostly around how the vendors should all get together in order to provide an open platform, thus enhancing the end-user ability to move inter-changeably from one product to another. We will dive into this in an upcoming article; today I really want to discuss internal standards of an IT organization.

As I have moved in and out of corporate data-centers in the last year, consulting on various projects, one glaring thing I have noticed, in the shops that I have visited is a lack of standards around which vendors are being deployed. I see one of two things, everything from one vendor, or the scattergun approach with many things from many vendors. There is a potential concern with either one of these approaches.

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