Why You Should Always Organize Your Server Rack

Despite the fact that servers essentially provide physical shells and boards for data to be stored, processed, pulled and provided, which is where the real magic happens, they still need to be organized when put together on a rack. There are a number of reasons for this, perhaps one of the most important is safety of the hardware.

Organization

Cable Management BarServer rack organization is simply good practice when it comes to protecting the function of the servers. Having everything unorganized and jumbled just creates a high risk for cables to be tangled up, an easy area to trip and pull the rack or parts down and cause damage, and a possibility of making a mistake when reconnecting cables or connections. Not to mention a bad trip and fall can cause you, your family or employees personal injury. With organization, a user has a very good idea where everything is and which server is associated with which function. This knowledge comes in handy during the next benefit.

A well-organized server rack also makes it far easier to upgrade systems and routers as necessary. Instead of trying to figure out where everything is when jumbled, the upgrade process can instead be a very clean procedure of disconnecting just the right parts and putting in the new replacements. That shortens down time and offline delay, and makes an upgrade far more efficient.

Hardware Safety

Server organization on a rack has a very important safety aspect as well. All that equipment running at the same time is going to generate heat. Heat may be pushed out by your server via a small fan, but there is still going to be some energy that becomes absorbed by the hardware itself and then emanates from the server as radiant heat. This moves upward in a convective fashion, making the servers at the top of a rack generally run in a warmer environment than those at the bottom of the rack. If everything is too tightly packed together, the heat will build up faster. Organizing a rack with this concept in mind then involves spacing as well as knowing which server generates the most heat and putting that one physically above the others. The lower the heat, the better your servers will run overall.

Labeling

Good organization also involves labeling. While you most likely remember what most of the parts are for, having a labeling system just makes rack server management easier. Your brain doesn’t have to stress what one piece of hardware was for versus the other. Instead, the labels already take care of the identification. And it just might come in handy when something is actually forgotten.

So the next time you are looking at a server rack and are tempted to just jam everything in where there’s a space, think again. Slow down, take some time to think about what you’re doing, and put together a system for installing each part and component. You will thank yourself later for doing so, and the organization will make your entire system run far better. Do it right the first time to avoid the headache of a second and third!

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