Finally got pics of my network!!!

[Mucman]

Here is a few pics of the server room I was working on. I will have more by tonight. This is my first real wiring job I have done so go easy on me

Server Room!

pic 1 - AC unit
pic 2 - Cable Management / Switches rack
equipment in order :
- bottom patch panel
- Cisco 3620 running the Cisco Firewall IOS
- Ascend router plus T1 boxy thingy
- Cisco 7240 VXR (doing nothing)
- Cisco 7240VXR conected to a 20MBit OC3
- Panduit
- Cisco 2948G - Trunks and web-servers
- Panduit
- Cisco 2924 - colos and LAN customers
- Cisco 2924 - private network
- Panduit
- Cisco 2924 - private network

pic 3 - back of main rack patch panels (all BIX )
pic 4 - front of main rack patch panels
pic 5 - Close up of the switches.

I will get picks of the servers on my structured cabling by tonight! Please critique this as well! This is a learning experience for me and I would love to hear how I could have made it better.

 

[Garion]

Looks very nice - One thing that I can't tell is do you have any kind of scheme that maps back the switch port to the jack number? IE, do ports 1-3 on the switch map to jacks 1-3? If not, it's a REAL hassle to try and run down a cable in tight bunches like that and you end up unbundling them to troubleshoot things. Otherwise, great!

- G

 

[Mucman]

Thanks Garion, since the cables that I got were just the right length and sort of had to do a middle - edge type cabling. So a cable in the middle of the patch panels goes to the edge of the switch. What great is that the coloring scheme makes things really easy. The green cables are the public network VLAN and can plug into any port on the 2948G. The yellow cables are on the private VLAN and can plug into any port on the bottom 2924s. The blue cables we have to be careful and check which VLAN they are etc... When I finish some other major projects I will be making a chart for all the patch panels which hopefully won't confuse anyone who works here after I leave .

Spidey07 will be happy to know that I did not make one patch cable and I got them all premade and cat5e certified All the structured cabling was done by yours truly with the General Cable cat5e solid from Home Depot. I followed the punch down spec for BIX that you should be able to get Gigabit speeds through everything except the older low density patch panels because I don't believe they are cat5e certified, but the high density ones are.

 

[Scarpozzi]

Garion said it. That's the toughest thing about cable management...It makes things look pretty, but makes it really tough to troubleshoot problems. If you have some system to keep track of it, great! One thing....if you're network consists of those switches only, it shouldn't be much of an issue as long as your clients don't get too pushy when problems arise...

 

[spidey07]

Looks good. Garion nailed the biggest pain.

I would hate to show pictures of ours. It is really hard to make 8 6509s look good when they have 250 ports each and 32 ports of gig.

 

[ScottMac]

Yeah! Looks OK, ya done good.

THe only possible issue I saw was the the cables coming out of the front of the switch may not have the minimum 2" Minimum Bend Radius (MBR). If you cut out a 4" circle out fo cardboard, the cable should follow the curve of the circle (or wider). Anything less than that is out of the recommended spec.

It was hard to tell from the Pics... if it's a 2"MBR, then you got it locked.

Congrats, that's better than most that I've seen.

FWIW

Scott

 

[Mucman]

Thanks for the comments guys!

Scarpozzi - Our network is pretty static. When things need to change it is usually to add something. With a switch for the public VLAN and a switch for the private VLAN things are pretty simple. We really aren't in the colo biz, but we do have some boxes for people in our building only so management for them isn't a big issue.

Spidey07 - I would love to see pics of those nevertheless

ScottMac (does everyone here start with an S? ) - I believe all cables are following that except the ones plugged into the bottom switch. We have to remount that switch since it is not flush mounted like the others. It is connecting the private network which is not as mission critical as the public network.
Is it not a good idea to to have the panduits right beside the switched (ie move them so their is a 1u gap between them?).

 

[Mucman]

added some new pics, some are the rear and front view of the row of racks. Also got a better pic of the switches without the glare. The hole picture is a large hole drilled through 2 feet of concrete. Our main feed, office connections and building customers are going through there.