SMB IT | Curtis Franklin » Tips for Wiring Your Office

April 21, 2006 | Comments: (0)

Tips for Wiring Your Office

TAGS: SMB Networking

SMBs tend to grow (or shrink, but let's not dwell on that). A side effect of that characteristic is the need to move around. Bigger offices, smaller offices, moving in, moving out.

That means wiring. Yes, I'm still a big proponent of wiring over wireless as the best general connection medium for the typical SMB. Check out my next Emerging Enterprise podcast if you want to hear me talk about why.

Meanwhile, if wiring a new office is on your horizon, make sure to incorporate these tips:

1. Talk to your architect and/or interior designer. If you've got someone laying out a floor plan for your office, make sure that your wiring plan corresponds. This is especially important for shared areas like conference rooms or meeting nooks as well as cubicle colonies that might require ceiling-to-floor wiring schemes.

2. Double up on ports. For each PC, try and add at least two data ports--three is better. Voice over IP is one important reason why. Flexibility is another. If the office layout suddenly changes and what was once a cubicle now becomes a mini printer room, you've got enough ports to make the transition easily. Accomodating guests, multpiple PCs per worker, new networkable peripherals we haven't thought of yet...the list goes on. Once the walls are open, laying the cable and punching it down is relatively cheap. Having to back track is what gets expensive, so err on the side of empty ports rather than winding up with too few.

3. Stick with Cat5e. Sure Cat6 is available, but I've yet to see a Cat6 cable that was so much better than a Cat5e wire that a network application would only run over Cat6. Cat5e is still the best combination of price vs. network applicability, capable of gigabit data, voice and anything else a general SMB will need.

If you expect really high-performance needs--10 gigabit per second ethernet to some ultra-fast workstations, for example--then I'd skip over Cat6 and head straight for fiber. Yeah, it requires some specialized knowledge, but the guys who do this don't charge that much more than the guys who run other cable. And if you need it for performance reasons, it's generally the least part of that budget anyway. Oh, and I'd definitely double up on ports here--fiber tends to break and you definitely don't want to be re-running that later in life if you can help it. Much easier to have a few extra's already installed.

4. Spring for a wiring closet. Too many small businesses want to avoid the cost of a server/wiring closet to save yet a few more sheckels. They run wires along the floors and ceilings and drop noisy servers in some abandoned cubicle in the middle of the office. Spend the sheckels already.

First, you'll give some guy like me enough money to buy beer for the weekend, and that's always a good deed. Second, you're trying to impress potential clients with your professionalism. If they're walking through an office that has a multi-colored cable monster descending from the ceiling through some ceiling panel that got broken out, well that's just the office equivalent of having a car up on blocks in your front yard. Third, having a closet means security. No yokel employee can accidentally unplug or reset the servers, for example.

It's easy. Just find a closet or that office that's so small it's an insult to the employee, and run an extra piece of ventilation through it. This can include an AC fan, but what you really want is a way to get the hot air out of the closet and somewhere else--like the office's ventilation shaft or even just outside through a wall.

5. Now add patch panels. Make sure there's enough ports to support all the nodes in your office one-to-one. Patch panels are fairly cheap and they make re-orging the physical network much, much easier than just running a bunch of 50ft patch cables between the switch and the user. They also look FAR more professional if anyone should get a glimpse of them and they serve to allow the actual cables to stay where they belong--in the wall. Don't worry about punching them down, that's why you're giving the wiring guy beer money.

Beneath the patch panel, you drop your server half-rack. A half rack, like the 25U APC NetShelter pictured above, is my favorite SMB racking tool precisely because it fits in most utility closets--as long as you trick out the closet with a little extra air. Now you can place three or even four servers in the rack, a couple of switches, an APC SmartUPS, the firewall/VPN/WAN router, the WLAN switch and a KVM drawer. Poof! You've got an excellent mini-data center that's not only out of sight, it's also easy for guys like me to fix. Think about it.

6. Label, label, label. Don't go play golf on wiring day. Be there and make sure that every cable is labeled. And I don't just mean making sure that the number on the port at the user's cubicle correspond to the port number in the wiring closet's patch panel. That's a given.

You also need to label the cable itself at each end. Why? Because sys admins tend to move these around or run new cables, even put in new punch blocks. Marking cables means a much easier time when it comes time clean up your wiring closet--moving to new wires, disgarding old or broken cables, etc. Take a few minutes now and save yourself hours later. It also makes tearing down the network and moving it to a new site much easier because everything is numbered. Just add patch panels and in-wall wiring at the new site and everything from the old site can plug right in.

7. Think about where you want wireless. Plan for wireless, don't just drop access points around willy nilly. If you plan for access points during the physical wiring phase, you'll have an easier time taking advantage of power-over-etherent-compatible access points, like Netgear's or Trapeze's. With PoE access points, you just need an Ethernet port to plug the AP into--it draws both power and data via Ethernet, plus it's automatically part of your wired network, so hooking it to a WLAN switch for real security is easy. Sure, you can buy dual-radio access points that can bridge amongst themselves as well as act as APs, but that's way more configuration time and the APs cost significantly more. Hooking them to a wired port is not only easier, it gives you an added measure of control and reliability.

Bring in a wireless specialist and run frequency scan across the office. This tells you where the wireless weak points are. These xcan happen because the floor and ceiling around that part of the office are made of different stuff, or maybe because there's a microwave oven beyond the next wall, or for any number of other reasons. A wireless specialist can figure all this out in just a few hours. Now use that information to pick the best spots for wireless decide on the range of the access points and how they'll talk to the rest of the network.

Posted by Oliver Rist on April 21, 2006 12:32 PM

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