[AusNOG] "Best practice" - guidelines, standards etc?

[Ross Wheeler]

Hi all.

I've been asked to assist with the redesign of a medium-sized business's 
IT infrastructure and am looking for any actual standards or guidelines 
relevant to Australia. The current site is quite a mess, ad-hoc additions 
and changes over many years and multiple people in charge.

Particular issues would include such things as OH&S requirements, 
best-practice for server/comms/cable racks, server room considerations 
against most risks etc.

Photos of some "well thought out" installations and racks would be 
beneficial.

To be clear, this is not a multi-million dollar datacentre. It's an entity 
of a couple of hundred staff with perhaps 2 or 3 racks of servers and 
comms gear, probably one additional enclosure for cable termination, patch 
etc.

They want to depart from the old "spaghetti everywhere" environment to 
something more managable. Suspended floors and rack doors to simply cover 
the mess up (but leave the underlying problems) are not where they want to 
be. They're sick of downtime and network instability because the wrong 
cable has been unplugged, or in accessing one cable another has been 
dislodged. Of avoidable downtime because nobody can find or follow 
anything to fix or work around a problem, etc.

Anyone got anything they can share?

TIA,
RossW