[AusNOG] Switch installation in data centre racks - front facing, or rear facing?

[Paul Wilkins]

Sam,
In an SP environment, you may well have whole rows dedicated to a single
service - email, or web say. In the rack itself, you'll have web_node_5007,
web_node_5008 etc.

In the enterprise, you'll have a few email blades, internal web, external
web, next to a bunch of file and print etc etc etc. These then likely are
all on different firewall interfaces/firewalls in different zones requiring
different routing and security.

Kind regards

Paul Wilkins

On 4 October 2017 at 15:41, Sam Silvester <sam.silvester at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Wed, Oct 4, 2017 at 2:38 PM, Paul Wilkins <paulwilkins369 at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>> Because SPs have the luxury to not use structured cabling, due to scale
>> where all switch ports share a common configuration, so there's no need for
>> a patch panel, just patch direct to the switch, whereas in enterprise,
>> inadvertent swapping of ports leads to P1s, hence, structured cabling is
>> fairly ubiquitous.
>>
>>
> I'm not sure I understand.
>
> We're talking about "ToR" switching in this thread i.e. switches share a
> rack with the servers in question.
>
> In both front and rear mounted switches, I'd assume all cables go direct
> from the server to the switch. If that's not what you mean, can you perhaps
> share what kind of cabling arrangement you've come across? I'd be
> interested in how it would work and what logic would go into such a
> decision.
>
> I'm also not sure how such a distinction between enterprise and SP would
> change anything. SPs would still have a mapping of server to port, it's not
> like just any server / cable goes into any old port and swapping them to a
> new/different arrangement during a switch change wouldn't matter...or am I
> making an incorrect assumption there?
>
> Cheers,
>
> Sam
>
>
>
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