DATA CENTER Best Practices Guide: High Density Cable Management Solutions v6.4.0

DATA CENTER BEST PRACTICES GUIDE
Brocade DCX Cable Management 7 of 23
This inefficient approach also contributes to the over-heating of data centers—particularly within raised
flooring and around the racks where cable clutter primarily occurs—requiring additional resources to cool
the systems.
Figure 4. Cable clutter
Using a Structured Approach
Cable management solutions designed specifically for Brocade SAN infrastructures (utilizing the Brocade
DCX Backbone family) enable a reliable, flexible, and highly efficient cable infrastructure throughout the
data center.
Depending on their specific requirements, organizations can choose from various structured fiber-optic
cable management solutions. By moving from traditional low-density, duplex patch cord cable solutions to
high-density, structured cable solutions, organizations can implement the physical layer in a much more
manageable and flexible manner while streamlining data center reconfigurations and simplifying
management. These cable technologies are also more energy-efficient, helping organizations to consolidate
their IT infrastructures.
Most importantly, these structured optical cable solutions improve performance across both short and long
distances while reducing bulk cable volume by more than 75 percent. As a result, these solutions can help
organizations simultaneously meet the performance, scalability, and efficiency needs of their next-
generation data centers and significantly reduce complexity.
Cabling High Density, High Port Count Fiber Equipment
As networking equipment becomes denser and port counts in the data center increase to several hundred
ports, managing cables connected to these devices becomes a difficult challenge. Traditionally, connecting
cables directly to individual ports on low port-count equipment was considered manageable. Applying the
same principles to high-density and high-port-count equipment makes the task more tedious, and it is
nearly impossible to add or remove cables connected directly to the equipment ports.
Using fiber cable assemblies that have a single connector at one end of the cable and multiple duplex
breakout cables at the other end is an alternative to alleviate cable management. Multifiber Push-On (MPO)
cable assemblies are designed to do just that. The idea is to pre-connect the high-density, high-port-count
Lucent Connector (LC) equipment with LC-MPO fan-out cable to dedicated MPO modules within a dedicated
patch panel. Once fully cabled, this patch panel functions as if it were “remote” ports for the equipment.
These dedicated patch panels ideally should be located above the equipment whose cabling they handle for
easier access to overhead cabling. Using this strategy drastically reduces equipment cabling clutter and
improves cable management.