Photos: Inside Cisco's European datacentre

As part of its revamped infrastructure strategy, Cisco is installing cabling in a new way. As the emphasis is on flexibility in an architecture moving towards full virtualisation, it makes sense to make the cabling flexible too.

Traditional data centre cabling runs under the floors and most IT professionals will admit that the biggest pain in moving systems is moving the cabling. Cisco now runs cables over rather than under the floor, in the yellow ducts shown here.

This makes it easier to re-configure the room’s devices and makes everything easier to see. It looks odd, but IT staff who are spared from having to scramble around floors tugging cables through conduits are unlikely to complain about aesthetics.

Another benefit is in heat distribution. Data centres run hot in certain parts and cool in others, which leads to poor heat distribution. According to Cisco’s managers, finding power is not a problem but dissipating its by-product, heat, is. Cables that run over, now under, data systems are now recommended as better distributor of heat.

 Now, who said that cabling was boring?