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

[Jay Dixon]

I think Sam's point was that the original email/question was asking purely
about direction front or back, not whether you use TOR switches or
structured cabling back to a central point :)

On Wed, Oct 4, 2017 at 4:06 PM, Paul Wilkins <paulwilkins369 at gmail.com>
wrote:

> 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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