Patch Panel

A typical issue for administrators of small server rooms (perhaps only one or two racks) is keeping cables tidy between servers (which have their network ports on the back) and network switches (which have their network ports on the front).

One way of reducing this problem is to have a patch panel at the front of the cabinet and a patch panel at the rear; this way your patch leads can be significantly shorter as well as making it easier to trace cables. In my implementation of this design the final 6 ports of the rear patch panel are dedicated to the KVM (which uses a USB/VGA to network cable adapter) to further simplify the cabling.

The photos and Visio drawing below show how things are organised now and how they will be in the not so distant future with up to 4Us of space allowed for a network switch directly above the front server patch panel.