Re: DATACENTER: Pictures of practical, neat, and scalable cable systems

[Daniel Hagerty <hag@ai.mit.edu>]

 > But yeah, datacenters/machine rooms do grow, as does technology.  You can
 > look at the last 20 years of technology by looking at the layers we have.
 > Custom ARPANet cable, 10Base5, 10Base2, Category 3, Category 5, Fiber..
 > and other random stuff.  And (especially in the university setting)
 > there's a yearly influx of new machines replacing older ones.  Very
 > dynamic to say the least.

    One thing I was planning to at my tenure at MIT was to install a
twisted pair cabling plant into our machine room, to at least reduce
the amount of utp that was wandering around under the floor.

    The basic idea was to use connectorized 25 pair cat five cabling
in a star configuration to each equipment rack.  If you have large
consumers of twisted pair (like your network switches or RS232 mux),
those probably live at the center of the star, rather than having to
drag more cabling from the wiring hub to where the switches are.

    In the machine room I spec'd this idea out for, we were carrying
10/10 ethernet, PRIs, RS232, RS422, and several other signaling types
over the existing twisted pair.  For this project I had tested out
signalling robustness for carrying all of the above on the same cable
bundle.

    Anyway, I left before we had the opportunity to implement this
cabling plant in production use;  although notably the machine I'm
typing from is going over the test plant :-)

    If someone is interested in the documentation I wrote up, let me
know and I can dig up the URL.