[AusNOG] Airflow for Cisco switches in racks

[Mark Foster]

I front-mount my switches and accept that I need to allow for a 
front-to-back cable path for my servers. In a rack with mixed gear-types 
it isn't that much of a drama because usually there's an available path 
for the purpose.  If done with decent cable management it also 'looks 
the part' - there are some quite good cable-management bars that have 
'brushed' penetrations that allow you to pass cabling through to the 
rear of the rackspace in an organised and tidy fashion.

As a datacentre operator (with cold-isle containment) nothing 
exasperates me more than seeing equipment mounted incorrectly - but we 
havn't policed this too zealously. Yet.  The bigger battle to fight is 
the one around ensuring customers fill in their blanks when they remove 
equipment!

Mark.


On 6/11/2015 7:36 p.m., Radek Tkaczyk wrote:
>
> Hi Damian,
>
> Yep that was the quickest/easiest thing to do – not ideal, but it 
> would keep NextDC happy at least.
>
> Keen to hear how other people are solving this problem.
>
> Regards,
>
> Radek Tkaczyk
>
> Ph: 0413 383 231
>
> *From:*Damian Guppy [mailto:the.damo at gmail.com]
> *Sent:* Friday, 6 November 2015 4:30 PM
> *To:* Radek Tkaczyk <radek at tkaczyk.id.au>
> *Cc:* AusNOG Mailing List <ausnog at ausnog.net>
> *Subject:* Re: [AusNOG] Airflow for Cisco switches in racks
>
> If you are mounting your 3750's on the rear posts they wont be deep 
> enough to reach the front, so as long as you blank out the front its 
> just going to exhaust air around your other equipment and the blanking 
> plates should stop most of it leaking back into the cold isle.
>
> --Damian
>
> On Fri, Nov 6, 2015 at 10:49 AM, Radek Tkaczyk <radek at tkaczyk.id.au 
> <mailto:radek at tkaczyk.id.au>> wrote:
>
>     Hi Guys,
>
>     We always mount our network switches in our racks with the
>     switches facing the rear, so that when you cable up servers, you
>     don’t have a mess of network cabling going from the front of the
>     rack to the back of the rack. This has worked well for us for the
>     last 10 years or so, but recently with providers like NextDC doing
>     cold isle containment, this means that switches are blowing hot
>     air into the cold aisle, and some people get unhappy with this.
>
>     We use Cisco 3750 switches which are 1RU, and they blow hot air
>     out the back of the switches, some models have side-to-back
>     airflow, but it still results in hot air being sent into the cold
>     aisle. I have always thought that this amount of hot air was
>     negligible, and wouldn’t even matter in the overall scheme of
>     things, as long as your servers were mounted around the right way.
>
>     How are other people handling this situation? I’m not really keen
>     on changing our rack standards and having to re-do the entire
>     cabling for racks across the 4 of our data centres that are using
>     cold isle containment!
>
>     Regards,
>
>     Radek Tkaczyk
>
>     Ph: 0413 383 231 <tel:0413%20383%20231>
>
>

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