12-Sep-2012

Cable database?

Shortly, it looks like I'm going to get the opportunity to rebuild our data centre from the ground up with nearly all new equipment. The design is rather cable dense (lots of VMware nodes with seven, yep, count them, seven) network connections per 1 RU server.

Because the design calls for five racks and the network port counts only call for a couple of switches of each type (10 Gbit/s ethernet, 1 G/bit/s ethernet, and 8 Gbit/s fibrechannel) there are going to be quite a few patch panels in between racks to distribute switch ports for network fabrics without a switch physically mounted in that rack.

It appears that the cable count is somewhere around the 600+ mark.

Does anyone know of a good cable management database that does:

  • inter-rack cabling patch to patch
  • connector and protocol checking when creating a cable
  • cable barcodes

I've already explored CablePro, WireCAD, RackSmith, ODCNMS, OpenCabling, CableManager and a few others...

Update: I've settled on RackTables, which does everything I need except for patch panel to patch panel links, and the developers are promising that on their roadmap. I can get by without that at the moment as I'm only looking at 24 links, and I can work it out manually.

Posted at September 12, 2012 5:35 PM
Comments

Truly you are blessed with opportunity ;-)

Posted by: Ian Miller at September 28, 2012 8:28 PM

Comments are closed