Pre-Spring Cleaning: Make Sure Your Server Racks Are Organized!

Servers are more or less the beating heart of most businesses that have and rely on them. Therefore, they need to be taken care of.  This doesn’t just mean the IT guys coming in and dusting them off and making sure they are properly maintained from an internal standpoint—it also means physically keeping them in order so that they are easy to move around without wires or plus being pulled out of them. The better organized they are, the easier it will be for changes, alterations or fixes to be made when necessary. Below are some tips on how to keep those server racks organized this year to make your business, and it’s beating heart, more healthy and efficient.

MAKE SURE SERVER RACKS ARE IN GOOD SHAPE

Servers are being built with more and more hardware these days, making them heavier and heavier. As different components are added to servers over the years, this can physically weigh down on the racks themselves and cause them to bow or even break, which can be disasterous. Make sure the racks for the servers are in good shape and can easily slide in and out of the cabinet they are being stored in; or if the shelves don’t slide, that they aren’t about to break. It is much cheaper to replace the cabinets or racks these servers sit upon, then risk the cost of what would happen if an old shelf broke and caused the valuable hardware to crash down.

CLEARLY LABEL CORDS

Making sure all the cords and wires which connect the servers are clearly labeled is a critical part of the organizational process and will make everything much easier in the future, when servers must be repaired, altered or modified. This can be done through color coating and choosing specific colored cables per server so they are very easy to pick out and separate from the others; it can also be done with literal labels that are wrapped around the server cords in different places with different numbers on them. Taking the time to do this will pay off in the long run.