Solutions for Easier Cable Management

As we move to more and more complicated network, the cable management becomes much more difficult than ever before. If there is something wrong in the cable deployment or management, the system downtime may occur that directly affects the productivity and efficiency of the system. Meanwhile, if the cable is not well managed, the whole system will look very dirty, disorderly and bad. In order to solve these issues, several solutions are put forward to make the cable management faster and easier and maximize the performance of the system, such as, zip tie, patch panel, J-Hook, etc. In this paper, it will mainly study these commonly used cable management tools for deploying a sophisticate, but stable and tidy cabling network.

Zip tie can be also called cable tie or wire tie that functions as a fastener for holding cables or wires together. Compared to other cable management tools, zip tie is very cheap and easy to be used. Hence, it can be easily found in a wide range of applications for managing the cables. At present, there are various kinds of zip tie available on the market, for instance, velcro zip tie that can be reusable and adjustable to support frequent moves, adds, and changes of cables, and the stainless steel zip tie that can be used in the extremely cold, hot or corrosive application. To better know the function of the zip tie, you can learn it from the following figure, in which the black zip ties play a vital role in better cable management.

Patch panel, also referred to as patch bay, patch field or jack field, is a crucial unit in the wired network that consists of a number of similar or same jacks, with the aim of connecting and routing circuits for monitoring, interconnecting, and testing the circuits in a convenient, flexible way. In general, it can be simply divided into fiber patch panel and copper patch panel. Although the fiber patch panel is more expensive than the copper one, both of them have their own advantages and disadvantages. Therefore, you can just choose the more proper one to deploy your cabling network, enabling the ease of cabling network management and avoiding the data transmission error or failure. In addition, here offers a figure that shows the structure of 24 port Cat 6 patch panel for your reference.

As we all know that there are some widely used tools for hanging and supporting the cable bundles like zip tie and brindle ring. However, once these narrow-base kinds of fasteners exceed the bend radius of the cables, it may cause network failure. Hence, experts turn to J-Hook to solve this problem, as a cost effective solution. What should be noted it that the horizontal cabling tray is also designed for dealing with this problem, but it is not recommendable for its higher cost and taking more time for installation than J-Hook.

J-Hook, usually made of galvanized steel or sometimes of plastic polymers, can be installed in both indoor and outdoor. From its name, it is easy to learn that its structure is like the letter ldquo;Jrdquo;. You can also learn it from the following figure. This design of a wide base with smooth, rounded corner has the ability to effectively eliminate the potential for snags during installation, while preventing the cable bundle from stress as shown below. Due to the advantages mentioned above, it is highly suggested to choose J-Hook to manage the cable bundle.

There is no doubt that well organized cable management can make the network maintenance easier and faster, ensure the maximum performance of the network and reduce or eliminate the network connection errors and failure. It is really worthy choosing the proper cable management tools for better cable management. In addition, except for the three tools mentioned above, there are other kinds of tools like cable manager and cable lacing bar can be also used to manage the cable in better organization. Hope the information in this paper would be useful for you to deploy a neat and high performance network.