1. Ease of Use
One of the most important reasons to invest in a high quality cable management solution has to do with providing you and your employees easy access to not only the cables themselves, but to the devices that they’re connected to. If the cables running to and from the various devices you’re trying to maintain become tangled and interconnected, it will take a significantly longer amount of time to make sense of it all. This can lead to decreased efficiency and simple tasks like swapping out a hard drive taking much longer than they really should.
It is important for wires and cables to be organized and color coding is a great way to know which cables are designated for certain tasks and plug ins. For example, Ethernet cables tend to be blue.
2. Fire Safety
Another important reason to think about data center cable management has to do with fire safety. If cables become tangled and are not properly managed, they are much more likely to lead to sparks and even a fire if the situation is left unchecked for a long enough period of time. Likewise, someone could walk near a bundle of cables, trip and yank a cable out of its socket. This could also lead to a fire or even damaging the equipment that cable was connected to.
Another issue for you the employer, then becomes LNI claims from people injuring themselves by tripping on cables that are not properly managed and left in a rat’s nest of a mess.
3. Troubleshooting
One of the first steps to troubleshooting a piece of electronic equipment always involves testing the data transfer cable to make sure that it is still in good working order. Such a simple task becomes infinitely more complex if you’re looking at dozens (or in certain cases hundreds) of tangled cables that are in disarray. The ability to easily swap out cables, quickly access the cables you need to maintain, troubleshoot hardware and perform other basic tasks is another one of the many reasons why data center cable management is so important.