Installation and Maintenance of Data Networking Equipment (Guidelines and Best Practices)

Installation of data networking equipment

This chapter outlines the guidelines and best practices for the installation of data networking equipment. The information is mainly based on the experience gathered from environmental assessments that were performed by Cisco personnel at customer sites around the world.

It also covers a few installation requirements, which are already included in the product’s hardware installation guides, but are often missed!!

The guidelines and best practices that are explained in this module help improve operations by minimizing the risk of failure, increasing the mean time between failures (MTBF), reducing the installation time, and planning the maintenance costs.

Frequently missed requirements

The following are examples of requirements that are frequently missed in the field:

Ensure that the cables are not installed in front of the air ventilation grids (as shown in Figure 1) as it leads to improper ventilation, overheating of the equipment, and dust accumulation.

The following guidelines are recommended during the installation of copper cables:

Avoid placing multiple cable bundles over each other, or over bundling the cables, as it leads to performance degradation of the cables below.

You should also ensure that the copper cables are twisted together for canceling out Electromagnetic Interference (EMI) from the external sources that are not exposed even partially, as it results in EMI issues.

You MUST avoid the following actions that can stress the cable:

• Applying extra twists.
• Pulling or stretching beyond the specified pulling load rate.
• Creating tension in the suspension runs.
• Stapling or applying pressure with the cable ties.

Always avoid using patch cables, which are used to connect data networking equipment to patch panels that are constructed using a solid core STP cable with stranded core RJ-45 connectors.

That’s because this can cause failure of the individual cables over a period of time due to connector differences and core size (with no metal to metal connection between the blades of the connector and the core of the cable).