In This Issue: Cisco 2960 Series 8 Port Gigabit Switch | Best Practices for Cable Management in Data Centers | News to Start Your Day
Today we look at the device that revolutionized the home movie-watching experience. June 7th is National VCR Day, where we recognize the video cassette recorder, a device that, in its time, was a marvel of technology!
The CK Daily – The Opportunity to Do Something Right
Happy Monday, CK Fam!!
Ever driven past someone who is walking down the road and had your heart tell you to offer them a ride? What about help feed the food disadvantaged? I have.
Sometimes we come up with every excuse in the book to avoid meeting these situations head-on. We are called to do it, but our earthly experiences or something even smaller tries to prevent us from outreach to our fellow humans.
This is a PSA to all of the readers here to tell you to take a chance. Volunteer your time. Talk to your church leaders to get involved. Message your local food bank. Meet new people in different walks of life. Minister to them. Smile with them. Love them. Do something.
I hope we are all ready to have a great week and seize those opportunities when they arise or make them arise so that you can get involved.
Thanks all – have a blessed day,
Corey
Product Spotlights & Updates:
Happy Monday! Today we are featuring the Cisco 2960 Series switch with 10/100/1000 Ethernet ports and SFP Gigabit port.
Flexible, secure, and borderless, the Cisco 2960 series of switches are designed to meet the needs of today’s mid-market and branch office networking needs. These Layer 2 switches are equipped with Cisco’s LAN base software and come in an array of configurations, including 10/100 desktop connectivity, dual-purpose uplinks, and PoE in supporting models.
The WS-C2960G-8TC-L ships with 7, 10/100/1000 Ethernet ports, and a dual-purpose uplink port (dual-purpose uplinks have one SFP port and one 10/100/1000 Ethernet port, one port active at a time).
Grab one this week as part of our Deals of the Week and get 10% OFF!
Best Practices for Cable Management – 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.
Want to read more about Cable Management in Data Centers? Continue reading the rest of this article from the CK Learning Center here!
Today’s News to Start Your Day:
- As of this morning, in the US, active COVID cases are on a decline and are reported at 5,475,709.
- Jeff Bezos will fly on the first passenger flight of his space company Blue Origin, which the company plans to launch on July 2. Bezos’ brother Mark will join him, as will the winner of an auction being held for one of the seats. The highest bid stands at $2.8 million as of this morning.
- Almost half of restaurants are operating with 20% less staff than usual. As restaurants struggle to find workers, some managers use on-demand hiring apps to cover short-term staffing needs.
- Bitcoin’s price fell Friday morning after Elon Musk posted a tweet suggesting he’s fallen out of love with the world’s top cryptocurrency.
- David Dushman, the last surviving soldier who helped liberate Auschwitz-Birkenau, died on Saturday at the age of 98. Dushman helped free prisoners from the notorious Nazi concentration camp as a soldier for the Soviet Red Army in World War II.
