Some tricks I've picked up for colorizing patch cables... Your mileage may vary.
For any given cable you can control three different colors:
1. The color of the cable.
2. The color of the strain-relief boot.
3. The color of the electrical tape you wrap around the cable at each
end (the same at both ends) as a quick visual ID of which endpoints
are the same cable.
Also, *IF* your switching matrix is straightforward, consider getting
48-port 1U "virtual chassis" switches instead of a big switch. Then
interleave those switches with the 48-port patch panels on the rack
and use 1' cables from the switch to the panel. It makes it oh-so-easy
to trace which cable goes where and which cables are the exceptions
(hint: exceptions are the only cables longer than 1'!) You get bonus
points for not having to touch the cables while tracing (since that's
how you knock loose other cables while hunting for the current
problem).
I've never had much luck attaching labels to cables. Even when the
labels stay on they're impossible to quickly tell apart.
Others responded with what colour goes for what. Me? I learned that these colour conventions change drastically from one place to another.
Other than which interface or network you may be using, there is the issues of "sensitive"/secret network and white/public network.
In one organization red was for the sensitive private network, and in another red meant "danger Will Robinson", public unsafe network. In yet another red was for grounded power.
Use what works for you.
Warning about colours with a funny anecdote:
In a more secure network I ran security for, networks were literally separated and colour coded cables were enforced.
One day a cable needed to be replaced but we ran out of the said colour. The engineer was so scared of what the then security director (before my time) would say that he didn't fix the network for .. some time... until someone smacked him on the back of the head (the security director).
To be fair the the engineer, he was really concerned about security. Security-minded networks have their own silly downsides.
Use what is comfortable and/or necessary, no more.
I'll save the bandwidth and reply to everyone in one email
Lots of good replies, gave me lots of ideas and confirmed my planning
already. I like the idea of reserving some colors and the serial
numbers idea.
Some people seem were wishing I provided more details so my
'datacenter' basically has a D3 and has a bunch of T1s MPLS and some
tunnels running. Got some different VLANs and upper management would
like to seperate cable color by device type but I would rather do it
by VLAN. We are running VOIP and some workstation are running data
thru the phone to the patchpanel to the switch. Got two Juniper
firewalls clustered, not sure how to color code those but I'm sure
I'll figure it out.
I reserve for SPAWAR and have inspected a bunch of Navy networks,
luckily I don't have THAT much crypto to worry about.
Maybe I'll create a webpage on what I came up with! Thanks again for
all the replies.
Hello Newbie here (hopefully I have the correct list),
I was just wondering if anyone knows of a website with recommended
colors for cables for a new datacenter?
I have written some things down but I don't want to get stuck saying
'darn, I wish I would have bought this color for this type, now I am
stuck'.
What standard color to use if voice and data on same interface etc. Thanks.
--
Thank You, Joe
I have found that it's better not to standardize on wire color because
someone will always use the wrong color in a pinch if it will solve an
immediate problem. Instead, come up with a labeling system that clearly
defines the physical source and destination of the wire.
As you can see, by and large, people assign colors to functions. What color to what function varies like the wind. Unlike a previous employer whose colo-manager person insisted on using colors to represent cable lengths (Doh!), color -> function mapping seems pretty universal.
I used to do that too... Until I stood behind a rack trying to figure out which of the 70 or so gray wires from the switch was the one going to the box I was having the problem with. Then I bought as many different colors as I could find, and mixed things up a bit.
Right. The universal convention in NSA-type crypto gear is
red==cleartext, black==ciphertext. Designs have to provide proper
"red/black separation". But when Bill Cheswick and I put in the Bell
Labs firewall in the early 1990s, we used red cables for the dangerous
outside net.
Oppinions vary. There really is no standard. Most important is picking
something meaningful to you.
Here, I use:
yellow general ethernet
green serial connection
blue long distance ethernet (ie, going to another row)
black crossover
red T1s, etc
white permenant drops to cabinets, lashed down
and brown cat3 for POTs lines
Some people use like dark blue for the first ethernet connection to a
machine and light blue for the second connection.
It really just depends on what you want to accomplish. Just pick
something tha tworks for you and stick with it.
Colour coding works great, and it's easy to follow. Then there is that issue that pops up where *that* cable over there will work!
90% of our movable cable patches (aka stuff that is not hard wired into a patch panel) are less than three feet long and are totally enclosed within individual racks (e.g. server to top of rack switch, switch to patch panel, other side of patch panel to core) - Each end of the cable is labeled, so it's pretty easy to trace it.
I care more about cable management when you have something like a 6513 with a bunch of 48 port Ethernet blades. Not figured out a way to deal with that which doesn't look like complete crap - Doesn't matter what color they are. The vertical 7600s/6509-VE models are nice, but of course, we don't have those
Colour coding works great, and it's easy to follow. Then there is that issue that pops up where *that* cable over there will work!
90% of our movable cable patches (aka stuff that is not hard wired into a patch panel) are less than three feet long and are totally enclosed within individual racks (e.g. server to top of rack switch, switch to patch panel, other side of patch panel to core) - Each end of the cable is labeled, so it's pretty easy to trace it.
Labeling is good. As I've tried to follow the pace of this thread, I appreciate where someone else stated that (paraphrased) "males essentially have a problem with identifying colours". I personally am relatively colour blind (mostly red-orange are the same, as is black-green).
I care more about cable management when you have something like a 6513 with a bunch of 48 port Ethernet blades. Not figured out a way to deal with that which doesn't look like complete crap - Doesn't matter what color they are. The vertical 7600s/6509-VE models are nice, but of course, we don't have those
A very good friend of mine who is relatively quite older than I, used to run what we (I) would call now the 'IT' department in the Butterfield Bank of Bermuda way back years ago (relative), showed me pictures of closets which had numerous hundreds of Token Ring MAU connectors, attached to cabling dozens of feet long stretched down a corridor 100' at least after an effort to 'untangle' the typical 'this needs to be patched *to this floor*'.
I will forever remember those pictures, and forever know that no matter how badly labeled/coloured an Ethernet infrastructure environment is, it can never be as bad as having several hundreds of cables as thick as my baby finger, all the same colour, entangled in a mess worse than anything I've seen.
I would like to know ANYONE who has a policy strict enough, and enforces it so as to have even an almost perfect cabling infrastructure...is there such a thing?
God bless CATx cable, especially when it terminates within the same area that it originates from
Indeed, we solve the former problem using the latter solution. If someone
uses the wrong color, we require them to do the following:
1. Do NOT install the cable into the cable management. Leave
it hanging.
2. Use labels to label the intended color of the cable at each end
and at 2' increments along the length of the cable if it is more than
3.5 feet long.
Their datacenter is new, $3.6M in a new completely automated $200M
building, and it's *gorgeous*. Thanks to APC for organizing a (sales)
tour about 3 months ago; I love facility porn.
Course it can still get a little rough. In our noc we have a well working standard.
Blue == IPKVM
Black == Internal Data VLAN
Red == WAN VLAN
Green == Client managed device
Yellow == Client device (we manage)
White == to Desktop (or phone)
Pink == iSCSI
Orange == SAN fiber
Sadly we don't have any white and red (as someone else pointed out. Poor new tech with no fingers)
From: JoeSox [mailto:joesox@gmail.com]
Sent: Monday, June 16, 2008 3:32 PM
To: nanog@nanog.org
Subject: Cable Colors
Hello Newbie here (hopefully I have the correct list),
I was just wondering if anyone knows of a website with recommended
colors for cables for a new datacenter?
I have written some things down but I don't want to get stuck saying
'darn, I wish I would have bought this color for this type, now I am
stuck'.
What standard color to use if voice and data on same interface etc.
Thanks.
--
Thank You, Joe
We use this cable for our UDP applications: Amazon.com .
The fluoropolymer coating makes sure we don't drop any packets onto the
floor. At least that's what the salesman told me. And we don't need to
color-code them, they just kind of glow from their own awesomeness.
I was in a data center for a large bank here in Pittsburgh a few years ago, and they definitely went the extra mile to keep their cable plant neatly organized and properly dressed, and they continued to maintain that after the building was turned up.
That's the real test. I've seen lots of data centers and colo facilities that looked great for the grand opening and started turning into rat's nests as the move/add/change tickets started coming in
A boutique hosting company of my acquaintance once decided that cable management within racks was rather important -- they had the rather pragmatic opinion that setting things up right to start with was not enough, and that they also needed a conscious plan to keep things tidy as the cabinets filled up that did not rely on techs following rules or being diligent.
The initial cable install for the pre-provisioned servers was done with much planning and documentation by people who did data cabling for a living, and was correspondingly tidy. The cables were all blue. Any change that was required after that was installed using a red cable.
Once per week the data cabling people would return, within a posted window, and replace the temporary red patch cables with cut-to-length, tested, blue cables which were run according to the larger cabling strategy, and rigourously documented.
This approach had the advantage that the cabinets always looked pristine and the documentation was always current (modulo a few red cables), regardless of what changes had happened since the original install, and regardless of who had made those changes.
The theory was that bringing in dedicated cabling contractors to do audits once per week was cheaper in the grand scheme of things than dealing with the implications of messy cabling. There was an additional advantage that any potential customer who was shown the suite was overwhelmed with the pristine neatness of it, and felt immediately comfortable with the idea of emptying their own appallingly messy and undocumented machine room into such a place.
