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

[Sam Silvester]

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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