> It might make us weirdoes, but when cabling looks this neat it is a sexy and sleek piece of art.
I always tell people that server cabling is as much art is it science. When I was early in my career, I had some great mentors in this respect, and now when I see a well cabled rack, it really speaks to me.
Here is the reddit server rack just before we tore it down: http://imgur.com/DlaX4
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4472312
One of these days... my home theatre...
- 2 Ethernet for Redis/Web/Other traffic - 2 Ethernet for DB traffic - 1 Ethernet for our KVM - 1 Ethernet for our drac - 2 Power cables for A/B Power
Getting all the neatly into 1U cable arms was ... fun :-P
However, when physically at a facility, DRACs are not very handy. They also don't allow you to easily switch back forth over multiple servers.
The two also in part act as a back up for each other.
If you cant do the simple things, how can you do the complex.
I too was about to post /r/cableporn.
As someone who is responsible for data enter design and deployment - if anyone on my team was not acutely OCD over how the cabling looked, well they would not be a member of the team very long!
blades that self-interconnect wirelessly at short distances
With heartbeating etc. you want the minimal number of moving parts required (minimal chance of failuer).
The heartbeat is not high traffic and can be picked up by all servers in a cluster without worring about network faults.
Seems like a win-win, but then I am not a data-center expert.