Spectacular cable management, sending power, and second guessing: This week’s Top 5 cabling stories

Attractive data center infrastructure, practical advice for PoE, and a ‘Wait, what?’ from a cabling installer highlight the week’s biggest headlines.

Here are our most-popular stories from the past week about cabling design, installation and management.

1. Spectacular data center cabling

All it took was one Tweet—and a whole host of beauty shots on Flickr—to elicit oohs and aahs about how cable management can be done in a data center. A nice counterpoint to the many cabling disasters we send your way, here’s a nice look at how it should be done.

2. A practical approach to implementing power delivery over structured cabling

Sterling Vaden, a stalwart member of TIA standards-making bodies, wrote this article for us diving deep into several standard documents—IEEE 802.3af, at, and bt; as well as TIA TSB-184-A—all of which relate to power delivery over twisted-pair cables.

3. Verizon installer has a lot of questions

In response to a video we recently shared, an installer has a lot of questions about the installation project. Among them: Where is your rack grounding/bonding? Why are you using black cable ties in the plenum? And is that an aluminum ladder?

4. The 5 most pressing data center trends

Curated from an expert contribution to Consulting-Specifying Engineer magazine, this story highlights what a PE sees as the five most-compelling trends in data centers.

5. Direct-connect termination method to be recognized in TIA-568

Belden’s Ron Tellas relayed the news from February’s TIA TR-42 meeting: The TR-42.7 subcommittee included the direct-connect termination method in its latest draft of TIA-568.2-D. The method will be called modular plug terminated link.

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