There is a very strong move towards overhead raceways for both copper and fibre cabling in order to leave the underfloor area free of the big air dams which masses of Cat 6A 10Gigabit/s cables are now tending to form – which have a serious adverse effect on cooling efficiency and effectiveness.
But a major issue with overhead cable trays or raceways is that – if they are not from the same ‘family’ as the data centre racks/cabinets – is that there are a lot of time and effort consuming engineering and installation problems to overcome on site as different fixings and cable entry/exits fail to line up properly.
Even worse, non-family cable trays and raceways can seriously interfere with the roof-section fixings needed for cold-aisle containment or cocooning solutions. This can cause difficulties when both are being installed together. The scope for problems, when it is intended that cold-aisle cocooning will be retrofitted at a future date is immense; a potential engineering nightmare and a risk to future uptime.
To ensure that no such onsite engineering problems are encountered, Cannon Technologies, one of the main suppliers of cabinets and racks into data centres, has launched T4 cable trays for vertical installation within its cabinets, racks and patching frames plus T4 raceways for overhead cable management.
The Cannon Technologies T4 raceways are exactly matched to all of the companies’ wide range of equipment cabinets, racks and frames both in terms of fixings and cable entry/exit points. Available as both ‘single-deck’ and ‘double-decker’ they affix directly to the tops of the cabinets and the double-decker version (as shown in photo) allows route or cable type segregation – for example segregating fibre cables from copper or A-route from B-route.
T4 cable trays and T4 raceways are designed to perfectly integrate with Cannon’s T4 cold aisle cocooning solution – especially in a retrofit situation to guarantee that there is absolutely no need for emergency on-site re-engineering.
Said Cannon Technologies md Matt Goulding “We believe that data centre infrastructure should also be plug-and-play!”