Your business’s data center is the beating heart of your operations and enables your company’s connectivity. Therefore, keeping it organized is key to ensuring uptime, productivity, and profitability.
Part of that organization comes down to ensuring your network cabling is well maintained, which means it must be labeled.
In this new blog, the team at Connectivity will explain why labeling your network cabling is an important best practice.
Consider this Scenario
Let’s pretend that your business is growing, and you are getting ready to expand your data center. You have new hardware enclosures installed, switches and servers have been ordered, and you are preparing to run your structured cabling to patch panels in order to connect everything together.
Hopefully, you have done some planning ahead of time and will be installing cables that are labeled, which is critical when seeking a successful installation, as well as for the connectivity of your network down the road.
Ultimately, using cables that are labeled helps prevent someone from unplugging the wrong cable at the wrong time—which leads to operational downtime, causing your business to lose money.
Labeling Cables Saves Time & Money—Now & Later
In the short term, labeled cables helps you know where each cable needs to run, and it saves your field tech from spending their time sorting and labeling. It also prevents a heavy long cable from being pulled by the wrong end.
Looking ahead, having cables labeled comes in handy if you have to hire a new installer or you are faced with having to onboard a new network administrator. In this regard, it helps a new contractor or employee easily pick up where their predecessor left off. Their job, then, becomes much simpler and less complicated and confusing.
Best Practices to Consider
Now that you understand why labeling cables is important, let’s outline a few best practices. Consider the following:
Ensure labels are high-quality and waterproof. Make sure they won’t smear, rip, or scratch.
Use printed characters and avoid writing by hand on the cables. This ensures that the labels will be easy to read and identifying information won’t wear off.
It’s typically best to follow the TIA-606 voluntary standard. This is a standard that establishes labeling practices in industrial, residential, and healthcare facilities. The standard recommends that you identify the exact location that the cable is running to and from and could also include the floor number, closet, rack, patch panel, and port.
Connectivity Can Help
If the process of labeling your cables seems overwhelming, confusing, or time consuming, we encourage you not to stress. Why? Because our team would be happy to help with organizing your company’s layer one infrastructure with clearly labeled cables.
Our team is passionate about making cable management simple for our clients, and would be happy to help you with your next structured cabling project. Reach out to us today and schedule a consultation.