[rescue] Raised floor - first shots of installation...

[Greg A. Woods]

[ On Sunday, May 26, 2002 at 16:31:25 (-0400), Eric Webb wrote: ]
> Subject: Re: [rescue] Raised floor - first shots of installation...
>
> Hmm, maybe, but every installation I've ever seen puts their cables 
> underneath to make things prim and proper.

Overhead cables are _VERY_ prim and proper because if they're not then
they're as ugly as garbage dump!  :-)

Almost every installation I've ever seen that puts cables under the
floor has a horrid ugly rats nest of a mess under the floor after the
first six months of operation.  The only exception was a mainframe
datacentre where IBM technicians did all the work.  In their case though
many of the cables were really large and heavy, and though there was
often tons of extra cable to coil up and store (you don't casually
adjust the length of a six-wire three-phase power cord without really
good reason, nor do you shorten a disk or tape drive cable that's an
inch and a half in diameter and plug full of sheilded pairs!), the total
number of cables is relatively small compared to having hundreds of
CAT-5 patch cables between every cabinet.

I.e. messy untidy people hide their slop under the floor.  You can't
hide any shoddy cable management if it's all out in the open on trays
and ladders!  :-)

The old mystique of the mainframe datacentre just doesn't apply any more
-- we don't really need to see islands of pretty coloured metal boxes
sitting alone in nice rows in a pure white rooom.

The bigger benefit though is that overhead cables are also easily
accessible, instantly visually inspectable, and often far better
managed.

There was a huge discussion about this on the datacenter at shorty.com list
a while back (it's sort of an FAQ over there), and the consensus was
definitely to keep data cabling above the floor, and power too if you can.

> Home use may call for different protocols, depending on how much you proof it.

Esp. since most homes don't have enough ceiling clearance that you can
give up anything to a raised floor...  :-)

I've got a six-foot cabinet in my basement machine room, but I had to
lay it down on its side to get it under the central support beam, and
tipping it down and then back up would have been "difficult" if the
ceiling tiles had not been removed since it's big enough that even on
its side the diagonal length is fartehr than the tiles were from the
floor!  ;-)

I'm still working on getting the ugly rats nest of cables I strung up in
amongst the floor joists neatly down onto a cable tray or two so that I
can put the ceiling tiles back up (and in doing so hopefully reduce some
of the fan noise in the TV room above! :-).

-- 
								Greg A. Woods

+1 416 218-0098;  <gwoods at acm.org>;  <g.a.woods at ieee.org>;  <woods at robohack.ca>
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