Real-world server room nightmares

I did a study for a major banking instutuion as an Availability Specialist. I took a year's worth of severe, level 1 impact issues. 67% are just cable management, switches lacking covers/guards, inadvertent unplugging of the wrong circuit/run, etc.

When I transferred myself to the worst location, I budgeted 200K and 3 months time to correct a major physical layer problem...ended up making money as we found 26 T1's the bank had been paying for that had simply been disconnected and never repurposed. 26K per month for almost 5 years. We made money on the project.

I am (surprisingly) the winner of 2nd place. Keep in mind, this is what I found the first day on the job. This is NOT the way I left it. Actually, within the first week, a good friend and IT consultant I worked with got in there and spent an entire weekend getting the servers on racks, getting things hooked to UPS, and a lot of tracing and rewiring. The room would have never met the ideal. Previous companies that had leased the building had run most of the wiring to this combination telco/janitorial closet that was not really intended for server room use. While not the best environment, we actually got everything functional, stable, labeled, and documented.

The worse one I ever had to support was situated in the only vacant area available, in the recess behind the women's toilets. To patch in a computer, you needed a torch to see the switches behind all the cabling and once you were done, you needed a shower to wash away all the black grime and dust on your hands and up your arms.

Where do I start? My God people, how do you expect anything to work when every thing looks like the snake pits pictured here???. I am glad that I have an background in aviation and IT. This crap would not fly in my world. If an airplane was wired like that - somebody would be in jail.

It is very simple in nature to solve this...take pride and ownership of your server rooms, closets, networks and workmanship. So many problems can and could be prevented if the work is accomplished correctly. If you don't have the time to do something correctly then make the time. There is NO excuse for shoddy work and work ethic. I'm sorry if this came out a little strong and I stepped on some toes and this hurt some feelings but acquire a thicker skin and do the job right the first time and you won't have this problem.

What happened to buying a 8p8c crimper and making your own patch cables.. those 20 footers just became 8 2 foot cables after you factor in waste... I only had to show my boss one time the difference in cost of premade patch cables and DIY patch cables to get him to buy them. I do it all the time and I'm not even working in IT... and that's without bulk purchasing...