c7000 Pass-Thru cabling examples

[chuckk281]

Lee's customer needed a cabling contractor:

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Team,

                Despite our best efforts, we have been unable to convince a customer that Virtual Connect is a viable solution for an ESX cluster.  They have decided that 10Gb pass-thru modules are the best solution for their infrastructure.  Now that they have the product in house, they are wondering just exactly how they are going to run 192, 10Gb cables from the ToR switch to 3, c7000 chassis with 4 pass-thru modules each. 

So, does anyone out there have a picture of what a rack looks like with 192, 10Gb cables (plus the FC)? Anyone have a customer that has successfully done this, either in-house or with a cabling contractor? Customer wants some ideas on the best way to do this. Part of the silver lining is they do have the wide racks with the cable management on the side.

Any suggestions are appreciated, including reputable structured cable contractors.

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David replied:

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Around the year 2000 (pre-blade days), some of the mechanical engineers did an exercise where they put 42 x DL360 servers and cabled Cat5 to NIC0, NIC1 and iLO (126 cables), and the thick wad of cables was about 2 feet in diameter and couldn’t egress the rack even by opening up the “dog door” at the bottom.  There was a picture that floated around (sorry, I’ve looked) and it was used as a justification for blades internally and in some early customer meetings.  In fact, the original codename for the p-Class blades was ICE which stood for Infrastructure for Cable Elimination.

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Any suggestions or help for Lee's customer??