We have received some inquiries from existing and potential colocation clients about the "locked cabinets" mentioned in previous move blog entries. They are very nice cabinets manufactured by Cooper B-line... their "E2 Zone 4 Seismic Cabinet." Made of steel with locking doors on either side, two removable/locking side panels - the front door has a tinted Plexiglas panel. The four server mounting rails can be mounted at any position fore/aft. The entire cabinet is bolted to the floor. The roof of the cabinets have three openings, one for network cable entry, one for power cable entry, and one large vented one for a fan installation. The cabinets are available in both 19" and 23" widths. Anyone interested in deploying their Full-Rack installation in one of these fine enclosures, contact your digital.forest account manager.

Above: Our B-line steel locking server cabinets.

Work at the new facility continues.

Above: Outside plant guy and digital.forest network manager Kyle Murray meet regarding a propsed change in the fiber installation.

Some delays have come up with regards to our second fiber optic installation. Our chosen provider has some facility in the building but "getting from there to here" is the primary issue at the moment. While that is going on we continue the installation of our Ethernet wiring. All the wire bundles are pulled and installed, so now we are punching them down into patch panels. Thankfully we have some skilled labor in-house:

Above: It is a punchdown party. Clockwise from top: Sue Dart laces cable, Kyle Murray, Chris Kilbourn and Damian "The Terminator" Amrhein terminate Cat-5.

The final step in the cable installation is "lacing." Cable lacing is something of a lost art. It was how the phone company arranged installed cables in old switch rooms prior to the invention of "zip ties." The terminology for a clean cable installation has always been "tie down" and in the case of cable lacing it is quite literal. There is a sequence of knots, using a waxed lace to secure the cable bundles to the supporting steel ladder rack. Lacing provides a better tie down than zip ties, which can damage the cables and destroy the integrity of the network signal. Zip ties also make it difficult to trace or remove individual cables. Given the opportunity to do it right from the start, we chose to lace our cable installation. Two shifts have been terminating and one shift lacing this past week. Here is a sample of the lace work:

Above: Looking up at the laced cable bundles (blue) leaving the network core out towards the racks. The orange conduit on the left is fiber. The thick white 4-inch conduits high above the light fixture are one of the two pairs of fiber conduits coming into the facility. The orange and silver conduits on the upper ladder racks are the power feeds. The black finger-shaped items in the lower-right are cable management devices. It all looks jumbled in the forced perspective, but it is all separated by reasonable vertical distances.

Next update: The arrival of our new router.