Introducing creepy guy: This picture is worth a thousand words. Hopefully, this blog will be less.
In December 2020, I wrote and presented a webinar called, “Standards Matter: Optimizing your IT, voice, and data infrastructure with certified structured cabling in a post-pandemic world”. Video available here.
I asked my colleagues here at Connectivity Point to add and edit my content as they please so I could make it the best it could be. On the very last slide, I included the photo above and captioned it, “If anything you should take away from this presentation, I would like it to be that standards matter … they really do.” Cue up the picture above to emphasize my point. One of my fellow Rockstar CPDI sales peeps, Bill Paradis, had this feedback: “Can you please take out ‘creepy guy’ from the last slide?” I did and put in a picture of myself—if that is not creepy, I do not know what is—and my contact information per normal-last-slide-content stuff. However, every time I see his picture, I always think to myself, “Poor creepy guy …”
Poor creepy guy …
Stuck in a picture roll, miserable thinking to himself, “If only I did my spring cleaning and reorganized my IT cabling racks …” Perhaps that is a bit dramatic, but I am a creative writer so what do you expect? So … from a picture roll of creepy guy to a drum roll before the purpose of this blog post, we now get to my goal to explain about “Rack reorgs: The good, the bad and the ugly … like creepy guy.”
Spring cleaning
Like a good spring Claude Monet painting of water lilies, rack reorgs can be a beautiful piece of art. Is it time for you to do some good old fashioned spring cleaning?
The good.
When the copper cables in your rack look like the bottom of a Claude Monet lily pad, it is time to do some spring cleaning. A huge benefit to reorganizing your data racks is the decreased amount of connectivity disruption, the uptick in efficiency, and the protection of your networking equipment. Good cabling and a good rack help to organize and remove the stress on your copper wiring. Overall, by having an organized rack you are protecting your data integrity.
The bad.
Do not be like creepy guy! Creepy guy does not prioritize his IT closet and its function to house all things in networking and connectivity safely and securely, and that is ugly.
Things to tell us to make sure we are “In the (Project) Know”:
In my first blog, I captured how important it is to be in-the-project-know and to ask the right questions to ensure your stakeholders can properly quote and execute the job with all the fine details customized to your work environment. Here are some things to ask yourself in preparation for talking to us about the job of your rack reorg:
Take into consideration your downtime. Questions to ask yourself:
• When will you be able to have your services down for the period that we are tracing all the wire runs?
• Is it after business hours?
• Who will be available from your organization to power down the equipment in your closet and power back up again once the wires have been organized and labeled?
Out with the old and in with the new. Questions to ask yourself:
• Do you need new racks for the space you are in or are considering?
• Will it be a 2 or 4 panel rack? Enclosed or open?
• Do you have the space for any new equipment coming?
• Is there any new cabling that would need to be run? Is there any cabling that needs to be removed or replaced?
Organize by color-coding and labeling. Questions to ask yourself:
• Do you have a cabling color scheme?
• Do you have a diagram close by your rack to explain the scheme?
• Do you have your cables labeled to know where they are going?
I am going to end this blog by stating that which was not seen in my previous presentation, but has now brought creepy guy back to life, “If anything you should take away from this presentation, I would like it to be that standards matter … they really do.”
Call us. Email us. We can help guide and offer advice on the needs inventory above at any time. Our job is to prevent the creepy guys of the post-pandemic world because standards really do matter.
Until next time when we will cover Security Cameras—I always feel like somebody’s watching me! And I have no privacy!
