Good wiring in a server room takes pre-thought and effort. Not everyone is up to that.

The Worst Offenders

1. Anti-Grav

There is an ineluctable tendency of every wire to droop and sag until it forms an ankle high snare designed to link your falling body to the expensive electrical equipment you manage.

Well, it may not be tidy, but why not just hang the lot from the ceiling instead? I don’t think its just the massive carton of salt on the table that is going to give this server engineer a heart attack.

How not to do a server room

2. The Highly Evolved Mess

One of the often quoted arguments against ‘intelligent design’ in nature is the inefficient ways in which adaptations build on top of each other.

Server rooms can be the same: a little bit of slap dash wiring in the first instance and by the time you’ve gone from one server to several racks it’s too late.

Server room mess

Credit: console-cable.com

3. The One Man Disaster Zone

… and sometimes that happens at just one workstation.

Messy cables on desk

Credit: dotcom-monitor.com

4. The Jury-Rigged Coolant

Servers get hot. If you can’t get decent cooling in the room then the whole system will keep going down on overheat.

But get the cooling wrong right from the start and you may be forced to improvise later down the line, assuming you want to avoid turning the whole system into a fire hazard.

Server room with fans

Credit: thedailywtf.com

5. The Mapless Wonder

One of the joys of plastic is the way it takes pretty much whatever colour you want to add for that. Another great advantage of plastic is that it is a great electrical insulator and so can be used to sheath the metal of your server cables. Combine the two and you can colour code your server room any way you want.

Or not...

Server room with poor cable management

Credit: johnstonefitness.com

6. The Jackson Pollack

At the other extreme the blare of colour can just add to the overwhelming mess in ways that weave artistic marvels of the sort an abstract painter or angry chimpanzee might arrange on a canvas.

I doubt the engineers who have to fight through these paint strokes appreciate the aesthetics of depth of a room like this one though.

A wall of messy network cables

Credit: backupassist.com

7. Sheer Volume

Occasionally the mistake is not so much in the way wires are bound or linked up, but just that someone bought reams and reams of cables far longer than were needed for the job.

Still, why let that stop you, especially if they come in the same blood red as the alien weeds in Steven Spielberg's War of the Worlds.

Server room with red messy cables

8. The Horror, The Horror

This one manages to take the red weed concept even further apparently drawing not only on the physical effects in John Carpenter’s The Thing but also the strange convolutions of human intestines.

It’s not a server room, it is a horror show.

Messy ethernet cables

9. Total Toilet

If the office is small sometimes there isn’t room for a dedicated server. And in those cases you have to get creative, the demands of the server room don’t always combine with the demands of the office kitchen for example.

The toilet on the other hand, that makes total sense.

Server room with added toilet

10. The Combo-Whammy

Sometimes it is all of the above. Wires that are too long, plugged in at random, unbound, and in huge volumes.

Then gravity and evolution gets involved and it’s like a sci-fi waterfall of electronic horror.

Blue messy network cables

Credit: internap.com

To avoid this sort of wiring disaster, take a look at our custom cables.