A messy Comms Room or Data Cabinet means that the ports cannot be tracked and your system cannot be managed and troubleshooting will be an extremely painstaking job.
For someone that doesn’t know a lot about cabling or Comms Rooms/Cabinets, it is almost impossible to know what it should look like and what you should do about it. Luckily there are companies that specialise in data cabling and re-wiring Comms Rooms who come in handy when these problems occur.
To have a tidy and well-organized Comms Room, your cabling needs to be installed and patched in a neat manner, with the patch panels separated by a management bar every two panels. Each network system should be recognised by the grouping of colour co-ordinated cables and the length of each cable should not be longer than the distance from point A to point B as it will just mess up the cabinet. Any other products such as routers and switches should be fixed with in the cabinet on racks to keep everything in place.
Other than a tidy comms room being pleasing to the eye there are many other benefits. Firstly, with an organised cabling infrastructure you minimise the risk of leads being pulled out and broken, which can cause major problems such as putting the entire office offline. You also run the risk of wasting money on new and expensive hardware. If you have messy patching, it becomes almost impossible to see what ports are active and which ones are potentially free to use. Keeping everything up to date allows you to utilise the products you already have and not invest into equipment you don’t need at that moment in time.
Another potential hazard you might come across is linking two separate networks together that should have stayed separate. If you link two networks together by accident you may be giving access when you did not intend to and could end up with a security breach.
Although there is a cost associated with sorting out your Comms Room and it maybe be a time-consuming project, it is defiantly worth the investment. If you consider everything that could go wrong and the potential cost of not doing it, sorting out your Comms Room should be high on your to do list; the longer it’s left the bigger and more difficult the mess becomes to sort out.