HP Brocade 8/12c DATA CENTER Best Practices Guide: High Density Cable Manageme - Page 7

DATA CENTER BEST PRACTICES GUIDE This inefficient approach also contributes to the over-heating of data centers-particularly within raised flooring and around the racks where cable clutter primarily occurs-requiring additional resources to cool the systems. Figure 4. Cable clutter Using a Structured Approach Cable management solutions designed specifically for Brocade SAN infrastructures (utilizing the Brocade DCX Backbone family) enable a reliable, flexible, and highly efficient cable infrastructure throughout the data center. Depending on their specific requirements, organizations can choose from various structured fiber-optic cable management solutions. By moving from traditional low-density, duplex patch cord cable solutions to high-density, structured cable solutions, organizations can implement the physical layer in a much more manageable and flexible manner while streamlining data center reconfigurations and simplifying management. These cable technologies are also more energy-efficient, helping organizations to consolidate their IT infrastructures. Most importantly, these structured optical cable solutions improve performance across both short and long distances while reducing bulk cable volume by more than 75 percent. As a result, these solutions can help organizations simultaneously meet the performance, scalability, and efficiency needs of their nextgeneration data centers and significantly reduce complexity. Cabling High Density, High Port Count Fiber Equipment As networking equipment becomes denser and port counts in the data center increase to several hundred ports, managing cables connected to these devices becomes a difficult challenge. Traditionally, connecting cables directly to individual ports on low port-count equipment was considered manageable. Applying the same principles to high-density and high-port-count equipment makes the task more tedious, and it is nearly impossible to add or remove cables connected directly to the equipment ports. Using fiber cable assemblies that have a single connector at one end of the cable and multiple duplex breakout cables at the other end is an alternative to alleviate cable management. Multifiber Push-On (MPO) cable assemblies are designed to do just that. The idea is to pre-connect the high-density, high-port-count Lucent Connector (LC) equipment with LC-MPO fan-out cable to dedicated MPO modules within a dedicated patch panel. Once fully cabled, this patch panel functions as if it were "remote" ports for the equipment. These dedicated patch panels ideally should be located above the equipment whose cabling they handle for easier access to overhead cabling. Using this strategy drastically reduces equipment cabling clutter and improves cable management. Brocade DCX Cable Management 7 of 23