Cable management is not very important in SOHO environments but it becomes critical as the organization grows. There are some international standards, such as ANSI/TIA/EIA-606 – Administration Standard for the Telecommunications Infrastructure of Commercial Buildings, that go into detail about how cables should be managed inside an enterprise infrastructure. Some of the things it describes include the following:
- Information presentation
- Reports format
- Drawings format
- Work orders
- Pathway, space, and grounding considerations (including identifiers and labeling)
- Identifying cabling
- Labeling cabling (including color coding and bar coding)
Cable management mandates that everything is tagged and labeled according to a standard so that every cable can be identified by anyone in the organization. The ANSI/TIA/EIA-606 standard describes possible ways of labeling cables. One of these is using the XXX-YYY-ZZZ format, where:
- XXX is the building code
- YYY is the floor and room code
- ZZZ is the device and port code
For example, a cable labeled as DC01-02C-V011 can mean: Data Center 1 building, 2nd floor room C, Voice port 11. With this method of labeling, anyone can easily track the cable across the infrastructure.
The ANSI/TIA/EIA-606 standard even includes cable standardization based on color, as can be seen in the screenshot below (taken from the official standard itself):
Figure 25.4 – ANSI/TIA/EIA-606 Cable Color Codes