Today’s Topics: BBQ Love | TV/Monitor Wall Mount Brackets | Best Practices for Cable Management in Data Center | News to Start Your Day
Happy Monday!
Happy Presidents’ Day! Presidents’ Day was established in 1885 to honor George Washington’s birthday, which is on the 22nd…so Happy early Birthday to George Washington! We hope you will spend some time today to celebrate, honor, and reflect on the lives of all the presidents who made this great nation what it is today!
Good morning, you guys! Hope you all are keeping warm. The storms coming through the south and Midwest look pretty impactful. How’d your weekend rank on the love meter? We are not ones to go all out for Valentine’s Day, but the kids enjoy doing little things. We’ve been given lots of “I <3 U” crafts this weekend. Craig and I enjoyed an Italian date night after the kids were in bed. Low key but perfect for us.
Do we have any smoked meat fans here? Craig received a Traeger smoker for Christmas and made a Boston butt on it this weekend. I gave it two thumbs up. We are planning some chicken wings later this week. What’s your favorite smoked meat?
Christin
Product Spotlights and Updates:
Happy Monday! Are you struggling with body aches from bad posture and keeping the area around you tidy? Working from home and squeezing all your equipment on the desk in front of you can be difficult. Can’t find the perfect way to prop up your monitor?
Our TV/Monitor wall mount brackets might be able to help! These brackets are great to mount your TV or Monitor to the wall and get it off your hands! We have three types of wall mounts: Fixed, Tilted, and Full Motion. The Fixed wall mount keeps your equipment sturdy in place. The Tilted wall mount allows you to tilt your equipment 5° up and 15° down. The Full Motion wall mount allows you to tilt your equipment up to 10° and has a swivel motion of 120°.
These wall mount brackets can be used for TVs/Monitors ranging from 23”-70” and can hold up to 165lbs depending on the bracket size. And lucky for you, some of our wall mount brackets are on sale today!
Best Practices for Cable Management Data Centers – CK Learning Center
Every network administrator in the world has a horror story about cable management. In data centers, those horror stories grow into genuine nightmares. If enough people work on a system for a long enough period of time, the cables will eventually turn into some type of Ethernet vine monster. Only strict adherence to cable management practices can prevent this disaster. The following best practices assume you already know some of the basics. Instead, they’re aimed to help you avoid subtler missteps that occur frequently in modern data centers.
Plan for Growth
Everyone says this. Everyone acknowledges. It’s still common for data centers to struggle with growing pains. This is the first and most important principle in cable management and network design because it applies to everything else you do. It is easiest to see when planning space for additional cables.
The challenge is finding the sweet spot. If you leave too much space for growth, you’re hurting efficiency. If there is too little, you hit major challenges with future upgrades. The safest and most reasonable rule to follow is that of 50 percent. If your initial design and subsequent add-ons always plan around 50-percent growth, you should stay close to the golden sweet spot.
The other component of planning for growth applies to equipment selection. As you already know, everything in your data center will eventually be obsolete. The most efficient way to manage the cost and labor of upgrades is to plan around cabling. Replacing or upgrading major pathways is the most labor-intensive work in a data center. So, any time that labor is required, it should be accompanied with cable upgrades. Spend the money on the most up-to-date cables and connectors, and you’ll save a lot of pain down the road.
Plan in General
Growth is important, but you need a good plan for the center to function correctly. So much goes into network planning that covering it all here is impossible, but cable management needs to be a central focus in general planning. Modular and gridded support structures enable you to access cables at any point, and it makes replacement and management much simpler. In general, you want an initial plan or add-on to your center to follow a gridded approach. There should never be any doubt as to where any given cable can be accessed for any plausible reason.
Cable Stress
You know the basics of cable management already. Labels and color-coding help to keep track of everything and cables should not be arranged willy-nilly. And, while you already understand that stress is bad for cables, many network engineers still allow too much in their systems. The key to managing cable stress is the same as doing any job in the world: use the right tools.
Horizontal and vertical hangers are widely available. They’re an easy place to consider cutting costs, but more often than not, this is a mistake. The hangers help manage cable stress, and they almost always save money in the long run.
The other key to alleviating stress is to take your time. Yes, labor is expensive. That’s exactly why you don’t want to be re-running cables that have kinks and tears. As much as you feel pressured to get work done quickly, it’s worth a small investment of time to make sure every bend has a gentle sweep and nothing is unceremoniously stuffed into a corner of your pathway. It’s the simplest thing in the world, and it costs data centers everywhere thousands of dollars a year.
Interference Management
The last tip for today is interference. This is slowly becoming less of a problem because fiber optic cables are less prone to interference in the first place. Regardless, you still have copper lines, and they still require care. As you know, major electrical circuits are the main sources of signal interference for those copper lines. You have to put as much space and shielding between these components as possible. None of that is new.
What might help you is to remember that a few parts of your data center have surprisingly powerful currents. Major power lines aside, fluorescent lights and liquid coolers surprise many designers with how much interference they can provide. Keep that in mind.
These tips aren’t enough to make a novice into an expert network engineer, but hopefully, they can help you steer clear of a few common mistakes that plague experienced professionals. In addition to these tips, you want to spend the time to thoroughly investigate your choices on connectors, boots, and cable structures. A few small decisions can save a lot of time and effort when you’re maintaining your data center.
This article is from the CK Learning Center.
Today’s News to Start Your Day:
- As of this morning, in the US, there are 9,540,344 active COVID cases, 18,225,135 have recovered and there have been 497,177 deaths.
- India could become the world’s second-largest Covid vaccine maker, according to consulting firm Deloitte. Analysts say the country has the capacity to produce for both its own population and other developing countries. Even before Covid-19, the South Asian country produced up to about 60% of the world’s vaccines – and at a relatively low cost.
- GM unveiled a new Chevy Bolt Electric Utility Vehicle, or EUV, alongside its newly redesigned Chevy Bolt Electric Vehicle on Sunday evening. The 2022 Chevy Bolt EUV is designed to bring the best of the Chevy Bolt, but in a taller and longer SUV-like proportion, GM executives said. Both vehicles include GM’s Super Cruise semi-autonomous highway driver-assist system.
- Amazon confirmed last week it has started putting AI-equipped cameras in some delivery vans. It already requires contracted delivery workers to use an app, called, Mentor, that tracks and scores their driving behavior. Like the cameras, the app is designed to improve driver safety, but Amazon employees say the technology produces errors and, in some cases, tracks their location after they clock out from work.
- More than 140 million Americans in 26 states were under some sort of winter advisory heading into Monday as a major winter storm swept through the southern Plains. The storm, which has already caused power outages and a number of pileups on icy roads, was expected to travel up the Northeast through Tuesday, bringing heavy snow, ice, and freezing temperatures. Six inches to a foot of snow was forecast to stretch from the mid-Mississippi to Ohio Valleys, across the lower Great Lakes, and into northern New England, according to the service.
- Spotify is adapting a “Work from Anywhere” model, which will allow employees to choose whether they want to be in the office full time, be at home full time, or a combination of the two. The company will also introduce more flexibility around locations, so employees will be able to choose the country and city where they work. An increasing amount of companies are starting to consider remote work as a more permanent option due to the Covid-19 pandemic.