Ask Slashdot: Recommendations For Beautiful Network Cable Trays? 250
First time accepted submitter murpht2 writes "My company prides itself on an office environment that follows a modern design aesthetic: open floor plan, bold colors on the walls, cool lamps in the corners. We're now engaged in a significant upgrade to our IT systems and we have a clash: the IT team leader wants to run network cable in trays hanging from the ceiling so all the client computers have high-speed access to the new servers; the guy in charge of the office design wants to keep things looking clean and the cable trays don't fit the bill. We're in a building made entirely of bricks and concrete, so we lack some of the between-the-wall spaces that are used in other settings. Any suggestions for beautiful cable trays or other alternatives?"
Lucky you (Score:5, Insightful)
My company prides itself on an office environment that follows a modern design aesthetic: open floor plan, bold colors on the walls, cool lamps in the corners.
My lame company only prides itself on stupid shit like making good products and pleasing its customers.
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My company prides itself on an office environment that follows a modern design aesthetic: open floor plan, bold colors on the walls, cool lamps in the corners.
My lame company only prides itself on stupid shit like making good products and pleasing its customers.
Right. What stock should I be selling?
Q: Any suggestions for beautiful cable trays? (Score:3)
A: Live, nude women.
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That's great, as long as your company isn't in the business of designing offices
Re:Lucky you (Score:5, Insightful)
Submitter never said what his company actually does.
Perhaps having a "nice office aesthetic" is a requirement in the field they work in - perhaps it's even ... design! Last thing most customers looking for design work want to do is walk into a butt-ugly office that's full of drab (but functional) office furniture.
And there are many fields where yes, the office aesthetic does matter, especially in creative industries. And customers expect it, nay, demand it - they want to see what sort of creative "product" the company has, and office design is one of them that's visible, beyond existing products on the market.
Apple has shown that form is important - if not as important, as function. Having function is necessary, but so is form, as function without form is a complex mess no user desires. Though of course, sometimes they lean too far towards the "form" part at times.
And sometimes, it's actually GOOD to work in an environment that's not just beige cubes in a beige office with beige tables and beige equipment.
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Submitter never said what his company actually does.
Perhaps having a "nice office aesthetic" is a requirement in the field they work in - perhaps it's even ... design! Last thing most customers looking for design work want to do is walk into a butt-ugly office that's full of drab (but functional) office furniture.
And there are many fields where yes, the office aesthetic does matter, especially in creative industries. And customers expect it, nay, demand it - they want to see what sort of creative "product" the company has, and office design is one of them that's visible, beyond existing products on the market.
Apple has shown that form is important - if not as important, as function. Having function is necessary, but so is form, as function without form is a complex mess no user desires. Though of course, sometimes they lean too far towards the "form" part at times.
And sometimes, it's actually GOOD to work in an environment that's not just beige cubes in a beige office with beige tables and beige equipment.
Okay...but then, if something like a "nice office aesthetic" is core to their business, why are they asking for design advice on Slashdot? Either way, something is amiss here.
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Makes me wonder if someone at MS is over at some designer message board right now asking for advice on software engineering. ;-)
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Yeah, but these are Hipster Companies, where the design aesthetic of the network trays is far more important.
I'm betting there's an awful lot of pretentious sense of how awesome they are, equipped with turtle-necks and the ability to win buzzword bingo by 9am every day.
This makes me think of those Herman Miller chairs, which became the symbol of the .com era -- if your company had them, it was likely going
Re:Lucky you (Score:5, Interesting)
I spent the last decade in a job with a nice Herman Miller Aeron chair.
I now work a job with your run of the mill crappy cubicle chair.
While I make the same amount of money in the new job, it's considerably less satisfying spending my 8+ hours a day in this back-breaker.\
Happy employees stay longer, work longer, and refer other good potential employees.
Unhappy employees leave and work where it's nice.
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LOL, honest question ... was your company the original purchasers of them, or did they buy them from one of the many sales of such things after the .com era?
My understanding is that in San Francisco for a while you could buy them in lots of 100 for about 10% of the original price. They literally became the symbol of companies which were spending lavishly but weren't going to last very long, because they were being bought as status symbo
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And in the 80's it was the balans chair [staticflickr.com]
Not sure if they were used much in offices, but when I was a kid, it seemed like everyone that could afford a computer at home just had to have one
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Oh man, I saw one of those at a yard sale one time and wondered wtf it was. I thought it was maybe some kind of prayer bench.
How do you sit on it?
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like this - http://cisn.metu.edu.tr/2001-1/health.php [metu.edu.tr]
Re:Lucky you (Score:5, Insightful)
My company prides itself on an office environment that follows a modern design aesthetic: open floor plan, bold colors on the walls, cool lamps in the corners.
My lame company only prides itself on stupid shit like making good products and pleasing its customers.
The two aren't in opposition to one another.
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With an attitude like that your company will never be able to hire the cool hipsters.
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No, even worse...regular old-fashioned offices with four walls, a window, and a door. It's hell.
use wifi (Score:3)
the guy in charge of the office will love it, no wires. very pretty
Re:use wifi (Score:5, Informative)
Wifi is.. nice, but I wouldn't use it in a full office environment for everyday access. It's a big brick room, lots of computers, lots of interference. Not only is WiFi slower, but you end up with less throughput as interference requires random packets to be retransmitted.
Re:use wifi (Score:5, Informative)
The bigger problem is that having many nodes means having many collisions. The aggregate capacity of the WiFi channel goes down as the number of nodes increases. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CSMA/CA [wikipedia.org]
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I think the parent was tongue-in-cheek. That said, if they won't let you run wires, wifi may be your only solution.
Actually, this may be more than the company wants to spend, but talk the guy in charge of the building into installing raised floors. Run your cabling underneath. Then you don't have to worry about pretty trays or cabling.
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*Pretty cabling. :-) The idea of raised floors is that you can still run cabling. I should learn to proofread before hitting submit.
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Well, not wifi, and not as cheap, but infra-red transmission might be an option. You need to position repeaters around properly, and figure lines of sight, but ti should be doable. Wifi has the benefit that you don't need to worry (much) about signal path, but this comes at the expense of lots of collisions. With infrared you could use, e.g., overhead wiring behind a false-front ceiling, and have the transmitters come out pointed down from within the light fixtures. So they're invisible. You need a rec
Sure (Score:3)
If it's a small office, you can use Ethernet over power lines [techrepublic.com]. I have not used it before, but it seems to be what you are looking for.
That being said, it's difficult to give up the 1000 Mb connections from modern ethernet cables, along with POE for phones, etc. The designer by not putting ethernet cables in place did your business a disservice. A secure business requires secure ethernet.
Re:Sure (Score:4, Insightful)
If it's a small office, you can use Ethernet over power lines [techrepublic.com]. I have not used it before, but it seems to be what you are looking for.
That being said, it's difficult to give up the 1000 Mb connections from modern ethernet cables, along with POE for phones, etc. The designer by not putting ethernet cables in place did your business a disservice. A secure business requires secure ethernet.
Ethernet over power lines? Yikes, that's about as bad as WiFi for security and it will be SLOW, SLOW, SLOW if you use a lot of devices in a small space...
The ONLY solution that is workable here is to plan to wire up everything that doesn't move. Everyplace you put a power plug, plan for a network drop next to it with one or more ports.
Re:Sure (Score:5, Funny)
And after you set up Ethernet over power lines, you can set up Power over Ethernet equipment thereby eliminating all cables without needing to use WiFi!
3D Print (Score:3)
Buy typical cable trays, and 3D print some sort of fancy colorful casings for them. You can use a variety of designs and colors for aesthetic appeal. Plus even if it doesn't look all that great it will still be "cutting edge" technology in use, which will likely appeal to your business folks. Plus you can throw a 3D printer in your budget...
Re:3D Print (Score:5, Interesting)
Buy typical cable trays, and 3D print some sort of fancy colorful casings for them. You can use a variety of designs and colors for aesthetic appeal. Plus even if it doesn't look all that great it will still be "cutting edge" technology in use, which will likely appeal to your business folks. Plus you can throw a 3D printer in your budget...
Interesting idea, but given that it takes the average 3D printer hours to create something only a few inches across it's not terribly practical.
It would be more practical to hire a basket weaver... ooh... woven trays...
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It would be more practical to hire a basket weaver... ooh... woven trays...
Or, even better, a NATIVE AMERICAN basket weaver! Very hip. Very chic.
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WITH BEADING!
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Interesting idea, but given that it takes the average 3D printer hours to create something only a few inches across it's not terribly practical.
Maybe these hobbyist printers, but the industrial-grade printers can churn out a lot more than that. We rapid prototype critical parts of our product*, and we sell tens of thousands each year.
*Technically, we are just rapid prototyping the shape for the investment casting.
Anyway, the ideas is sound - just make pretty cable trays that fit within the aesthetic of the office. A competent cabinet maker should be able to make nice woodwork, and if the space is more industrial you can make something out of metal
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Right.
And how many firstborn children would your company charge to print custom cable trays for an entire large office? Would all the babies of Rhode Island suffice?
Same question regarding printing and then using a casting to make the trays.
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It depends. What is the material? They can probably use plastic if they are just for decoration. Sure, it will be more expensive than injection molding in quantity, but they aren't doing any real quantity. You could also vacuum form sheet plastic. None of this stuff is stratospherically expensive. If they are willing to have a carpenter come in and do stuff with wood, then they are already spending some coin on this project.
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Or... have a contest. Maybe someone will design long narrow suspension bridges and you can turn on some fans and have a Tacoma Narrows incident right in the office.
Whatever you do for trays or supports, where the cables are visible from below, go with specific colors to match the decor. I still can't figure out why with all the colors available for little-to-no extra cost, people go for... gray.
Any chance of running them underneath the floor surface? Route channels in the floor, cover it with carpet?
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Is that a 3D printed gun in your pocket or are you just feeling suicidal and have a weak grasp on the economics of mass production?
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I am not skeptical about the future of these technologies, I am skeptical about their present.
One day, maybe 10 or 20 or 50 years from now, 3D printing and home fabrication will be playing major roles in our economy and technology development, at the industrial level that has already started for prototyping.
Right now, like script kiddies and regular expressions and the nosql crowd, there are people out there who have a hammer and every problem looks like a nail.
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I'm not saying that hobbyist 3D printers are useless, but like any tool their use should be selected against the other available tools.
Buy plain, decorate (Score:5, Interesting)
I might not bother trying to find beautiful trays, but instead find regular ones, then decorate!
Take something like this: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B003AU3HG6?ie=UTF8&camp=213733&creative=393185&creativeASIN=B003AU3HG6&linkCode=shr&tag=preinheimerco-20&qid=1386087250&sr=8-5&keywords=wire+tray [amazon.com]
Then put these underneath: http://www.whatisblik.com/shop/explore?theme=77 [whatisblik.com]
Turn your office ceiling into a pacman arena!
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amazon link was for rack cables, something more like this: http://www.metsec.com/cable-management/cable-tray/ [metsec.com]
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Then you could post your project on pinterest!
Form over Function? Really? (Score:3)
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I'd also add that beyond the HVAC system there will need to be power outlets everywhere to power all this computing equipment. Power outlets require wiring too. You cannot run power and network in the same conduit by code, but you certainly can use something that looks the same as what they where planning to use for power....
You mean they didn't think of power? It's time to abandon this job if they didn't have a plan for power and the budget to pay for it because you work for idiots.
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You can have the power and data in the same "conduit" if you get twin raceway.
http://store.cableorganizer.com/p-59711-twin-70-power-rated-multi-channel-raceway-base-8ft-qty-24-ft.aspx?gclid=CK-M-bzOlLsCFYqFfgodKWYAlg [cableorganizer.com]
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Especially long runs in parallel.
Contrasting rattle can colors (Score:5, Interesting)
Use brightly colored cables, get metal cable tray and rattle can spray paint it a contrasting color. I've seen it done very well, and it does add a near technical feel to a space.
Any interior designer could help you; if you're going for image, then that's probably not a bad idea anyway.
If you're not going for image.. drop tile. :)
Best Of Both Worlds? (Score:3)
They're both right: The network guy about trays being a great solution, and the office designer about trays being butt-ugly.
However, why not work some type of panelling below, rising to the sides of the trays? I'm not a designer by far, but is seems to me that
hiding the trays cannot be exceptionally difficult, and can be done with much freedom of style. And all of that should be open from the top,
and far enough from the ceiling to keep easy access.
Next, the cables coming down. The covering should accomodate cabledrops without these having to "spill over", and in a way that keeps them very accessible. simple holes? Also, the cables themselves could be surrounded by some spiral or other form, lending them style and possibly even some strength. The spiral could even be strung between the casing and the desk, making it an active element of design, rather than a trick to 'hide the ugly cable'.
the panelings could be cut/painted in a themes shape/color, of be kept elegantly simple, depending on the design of the surrounding office.
-f
How much cabling do you need? (Score:2)
Is this a tray requiring 100s of connections or 10? Is this in an office environment, or the datacenter? How much time and money do you want to waste, I mean spend, on this?
Either way, take a standard metal lattice cable tray and get it in black. More importantly, make sure the cables are laid out neatly, as in if they all fit on the bottom of the tray, keep them on the bottom, not piled up on each other.
Use fiber trays instead. These are typically troughs. CNC some designs in them and install LEDs insi
Train the office pets? (Score:4, Funny)
You do have office pets, right? Just give them a collar with clips that hold SD cards, then train them to go to the server room and fill up the cards with data and return them to you.
Latency is a little high, but bandwidth can be pretty good - as they say, never underestimate the bandwidth of a Golden Retriever with a collar full of SD cards.
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Golden Retriever?
No, no ... St. Bernard ...
Latency might suck, but the burst rate is fantaastic if you fill the little barrel full.
Look at rain gutters... (Score:5, Interesting)
Some years ago when I moved my company into a new office and wanted to keep the cost down, I installed rain gutters (and occasional downspout) on the walls inside to run telephone and ethernet. It was inexpensive compared to official cable trays and hid the wiring nicely.
Gutters are standard architectural details and since they are very visible you can find nice looking designs and colors.
Easy! (Score:3, Funny)
Simple: Ditch the servers and move to cloud. Then fire all your IT staff and replace them with contractors from India.
1. No need to work about the aesthetics of the server room.
2. Your office will now have additional space with the removal of all that ugly looking IT equipment.
3. Your managers will no longer have to listen to petty arguments by the IT workers.
4. You company will save money by hiring cheap IT workers from India.
Its a WIN-WIN situation for everyone!
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5. Your workers won't complain about too much work, because they'll be too busy doing nothing while the cloud infrastructure also does nothing.
Get some catalogs (Score:2)
And look for existing tray products. In spite of some of the ideas proposed for custom made trays keep this in mind: the electrical/fire code in your jurisdiction probably will insist on the trays being "listed" for the intended purpose. Anything else may require some sort of engineering sign off and UL certification. You don't even want to know what that will cost.
Sure, it seems like a pretty trivial issue. But if your inspector throws a fit, you are screwed.
Industrial look get industrial looking cable trays (Score:5, Interesting)
The good ones are powder coated so you can get a colour of your choice to match the office.
Use a tool called a cable comb when you are running the cables to put the cables into very straight and neat bundles.
Here is the manufacturer of a good quality system for cable trays:
http://wiremaidusa.com/
(they have many resellers. Your cabling contractor likely deals with a supplier who can get this)
Here is the cable comb tool for making straightened bundles of cables that look neat in they tray:
http://www.acomtools.com/
If you want something more enclosed then you can go to full conduit installation using metal pipes. The pipes can then be painted to match your ceiling colour.
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Yes, this exactly.
Keep the tray as small and unobtrusive as possible, you actually want to see as much of the cable as possible. Don't try to hide the but find a professional installer that will make the cables neat, tidy as possible. Belden and cables and others have a wide range of colors that you could offer and you could probably find a nice bold one to go with what the designer might like. It could actually be something of a feature if this is a design/tech kind of company.
Beautiful to the eyes, but what about the ears? (Score:4, Informative)
"My company prides itself on an office environment that follows a modern design aesthetic: open floor plan, bold colors on the walls, cool lamps in the corners."
I'm happy for you that your office is pretty. But where do you go when you need to stop "collaborating" and get some actual work done? Or when the group at the bench across from yours is "collaborating" so loudly that your group can't hear each other talk?
Open floor plans may be great for some jobs, but they are poison for work that requires concentration, especially when that work also entails remote collaboration. If you find this isn't true, I'd like to hear more -- especially about how you handle conference-call participation when there's a loud discussion nearby.
(Yeah, I know I'll take an "off-topic" hit to my karma for this. Sorry; it's a hot button at the moment.)
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tray problem? (Score:2)
I assume a cable hangs from the tray to the desktop? I suggest adding some climbing vines, with pots, so it looks natural. You can also add a few spider monkeys to go up and down the cables, and their poop will fertilize the vines after you scrape it off everything??
The basic problem with trays is the cable from tray to desk.
If you used a dropped ceiling (aka ceiling plates), you could have a high BW bidirectional infra-red network from overhead to desk. In fact, with a few bidirectional emitters you might
Cableporn ? (Score:5, Interesting)
You might want to get some inspiration from reddit [reddit.com] / imgur [imgur.com] cableporn sections.
Easy. (Score:2)
http://www.screwfix.com/p/square-line-gutter-114mm-white-pack-of-6/16271 [screwfix.com]
It's cheap, durable, hides the cables perfectly, is available in three colors (Black, grey, white), cuts to length and can be easily decorated.
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Also, it neatly attaches to vertical sections to carry the cables tidily from ceiling height down to the desks.
Spray paint (Score:2)
False flooring is the way to go. (Score:3)
Long back in a aeronautical facility (in India) I was surprised by the presence of toilet plungers in the corners of many rooms. When I asked one of the technicians he said, they are used to create the suction needed to pull up any tile on the floor, to access the crawl space below. Instead of providing trap doors at a few locations to get to the crawl space, these guys pull up any tile anywhere on the floor, reach in and grab the cables!
In USA if some one would make carpets or under-carpet padding that can accommodate cables without making the surface uneven on top, it would make a killing. Quick someone patent this.
Flat cable (Score:2)
Depends on how many connections you need, but hiding flat cable under the carpet can be a viable option.
http://www.vpi.us/cable-sf-cat6.html [www.vpi.us]
Then again, the poster doesn't specify whether this office has carpet.
Duck Tape (Score:2)
Paste to floor and you get StumbleUpon, Sticky Notes and Pastebin for free!
You simply have to pull the wire.. (Score:2)
How are they going to power all this equipment? Obviously they are going to have to put in power drops everywhere to power up all those handy devices, cell phone chargers, computers, laptops and printers, so just do the same thing for your network they are planning to do for the power.
You want to plan for at least one network drop for *every* power outlet they put in, plus put in two everyplace you currently plan to put desks. The two (network and power) do not go in the same conduit or cable ways by code
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CAT-5 works just fine for 1000BASE-T (Gigabit over copper) for runs under 100 Meters. I suppose you could spec out CAT-6 if you wanted, but I don't see where there is any benefit in the short term. Most desktop computers only run at gigabit which runs over CAT-5 and few places can afford the switching infrastructure to carry more than that to all their drops. CAT-6 punch down blocks, outlets, patch cables and wire is much more expensive than CAT-5. It's just not worth it to go with anything better than CA
Model railroads (Score:3)
Electricity for computers (Score:3)
Do you have electricity for the computers to use? If so, someone was once able to install wiring. Call that guy to install network wiring.
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it's an open office. the designer just figured they'll use laptops and ipads. that's what is on all the design brochure adverts anyways on the tables.
(you _do_ make an exceedingly good point though. what the fuck are you going to do with datalines without power? it's the friggin designers problem. the day he starts designing coffee houses he can forget about cabling...)
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And gut the office while he does it. Poured concrete requires coreing and jackhammers to run the conduit and repatch.
The fault lies at the feet of the contractor that did the job, why data conduit was not installed first is his fault and he should be docked money for missing it.
Raised floors... (Score:2)
It was good enough in my day... :)
Do it like Google (Score:2)
Either color-code the cables and bind them very nicely together, or color-code some pipes/conduit and run the cables through those.
Make it look like Google's data centers. Wires [google.com] or pipes [google.com].
Be aware of fire code! (Score:2)
Cable trays.... (Score:2)
Just have the contractor put a visual barrier around them to satisfy the "that looks icky" people. thin wood box painted the color of the wall it is near or the ceiling color.
Copy Squarespace (Score:2)
They used a raised platform and even put some rope lighting underneath around the edges. Looks great and would give you a way to run cables underneath to the workstations.
Have you looked at cable lacing? (Score:2)
Have you looked at cable lacing? You could skip the trays and just suspend the laced bundle from the celing.
Single wires ane regional switches. (Score:2)
Put the switch
Re:802.11ac (Score:5, Informative)
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I think you may have hit the reason why it's not feasible right there.
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+1
1) It's a security risk.
It's debatable whether or not a WPA-Enterprise Wifi network is less secure than the typical small office ethernet deployment where I can plug a computer into any conference room ethernet jack and have full access to the entire network. Very few small businesses use 802.1x port authentication on their hard wired networks or even force ports to guest VLANS in shared spaces like conference rooms and break rooms.
2) It'll be slower. The quoted network speeds are when there's no congestion, which won't be the case when an office has 100 PCs all on the network.
If you put 100 clients on a single Wifi node, then you get what you deserve.
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What's not clear in "high-speed access to the new servers"? Or are you assuming all servers are on the other side of the internet?
What's not clear in "If you want aesthetics" -- without a drop ceiling or hollow walls to hide cable in, it's going to be exposed.
In my office (with substandard wiring that can only support 100mbit for most people - I get better throughput on the 802.11n Wifi network if no one else is watching cat videos on it), no one ever complains that the fileserver is slow, but people complain daily that the "internet is slow".
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I suppose your use case is identical to everyone else. No, wireless just isn't an option for any reasonably sized office for anything other than mobile access.
Aesthetics be damned, productivity comes first.
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I suppose your use case is identical to everyone else. No, wireless just isn't an option for any reasonably sized office for anything other than mobile access.
Well no, in my office we run ethernet above the drop ceiling and bring it down to the cube walls in risers. Except for the newly leased portion of the office, we have 10 people back there on 2 Wifi nodes (one is meant for the large conference room but covers the cubes too) and they seem quite content with the situation. Running ethernet back there is somewhat difficult since it has to traverse a firewall (a physical firewall) and we don't plan on staying in this office for long so we've tacked a couple cabl
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Drainpipe should be ideal.
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Using rigid (or PVC) conduit as a raceway for your cables, paint them any color you like. Paint the walls a dark gray charcoal and data conduits bright orange.. everything exposed (ductwork, conduit) and use industrial surface mount boxes for the data jacks (with a black wall-plate).
Looks bad-ass.
Expensive as hell.
PVC is not really that expensive so that's not really such a bad idea (10 feet of 4" PVC is around half or less the cost of a wire cable tray), but it makes adding additional cables or rerouting existing cables much more difficult -- make sure you pull spares and leave pull strings because you'll always need more -- and don't overfill the conduit.
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I'd second the recommendation for a CNC shop. Anodized aluminum, whatever color you want, or if anodizing isn't up to snuff, powder coating, or having it dipped.
Your choice of shapes, fasteners, how things attach. Combine this with pairs of holes for zip ties, and it will be a fairly neat server room.
Another thing I've seen was fiber optic multiplexers that would take a rack of 10gigE signal, run it along one fiber to a de-muxer near the router. That way, there is one, and only one network cable from eac
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I've wondered about clear UPVC pipes as well.
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... and being gay does not mean someone has some aesthetic taste.
(sorry, just wanted both the inverse and converse represented). The trolling A/C is a loser. I really like the submitter's question, not because I particularly care about cable trays but because it shows that she or he is the opposite of the BOFH: asking how to fit the various users' needs rather than forcing people to just put up with what IT wants to give 'em.
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* Obligatory serious note: make sure to research these ideas before implementing anything in the second paragraph!
Yeah, like googling "electrical interference" and "fire code".
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Just make sure that you are using non-plenum cabling.
You can ALWAYS use plenum rated cabling; you can't always use non-plenum. Plenum is less toxic when it catches fire.
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Yea, the knife is a bit less deadly than the sword.
You don't want to breathe the products of either... it still decays into hydrogen chloride, which will readily form hydrochloric acid on contact with moisture (such as the moisture in your lungs).
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I've seen this type of comment several times. I wholeheartedly believe that producing valuable services or products is more important than aesthetics, but.... why do people assume they aren't? If you've got a company that is doing what it needs to be doing on the production side, why wouldn't you want to make the environment as comfortable and inviting as you can? Staff that feels comfortable is probably going to be easier to retain and if you have clients who see your workspace, then aesthetics are actuall
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I am very visually distracted. Something like this would make me (and anyone else like me) unable to productively work as I would always be trying to see what the motion was.