When I realized that I wanted to go back to school, I stopped to think about what I would need to do. It had been years since I cracked open a textbook, much less learned something new on a computer. However, I wanted to succeed, so I started to learn more about technology. I spent hours brushing up on my computer troubleshooting skills and when I was done, I felt a little more prepared. After I started school, I learned even more. I made this blog to teach other people a little about technology, so that you can keep up with your peers.
Structured cabling is a specific approach to handling networking infrastructure. It focuses on making sure your setup enables your operations activities by creating a planned layout for every cable. If you have questions about whether it's time to get serious about investing in structured cabling services, see if your situation sounds like at least one of these four scenarios.
Replacement Efforts Are Painful
The ability to quickly swap one set of cables out for another is critical in many networked settings. A server farm, for example, can't afford the downtime needed to trace cables from origins to destinations, remove them, and run replacements.
If you're encountering this problem, it's probably far past time to adopt structured cabling. In a structured model, technicians leave spare lines in the system so they can do emergency swaps. Likewise, they use conduits and labeled cables to ensure they can quickly identify and remove existing ones. They can then rapidly deploy new cables with high confidence.
Significant Network Growth
As a network grows, the value of using structured cabling services increases, too. It can be easy to tolerate a somewhat ramshackle cabling setup if you only have a few systems in place. Once that grows into the tens, hundreds, or thousands, it can become a pain.
Most structured cabling services providers try to help their customers plan for growth. You can establish projections for how much you expect your network to expand in the next 5 years, for example. The technicians can then study your plans and location to map the structure of the cables to your organization's growth expectations.
Physical Obstruction
If any cable represents a physical obstruction, that's a sign it's time to get serious about structure. People should trip over cables. Likewise, they shouldn't have to tug at or unplug cables to connect or disconnect devices. Also, there shouldn't be a single hanging cable. If your cabling spaces look like a bomb went off, impose some structure on them immediately.
The Cables Look Cluttered
Even if you have the situation under control, disorderly cabling is almost always bad cabling. Once more, the goal is to bring order to the mess. Structured cabling companies can band collections of cables together to ensure they'll be visually tight and easy to access. This also tends to save space by condensing the cables into a few areas. Once you have pretty cables, you'll appreciate the benefits of order as both a practical and aesthetic choice.
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