Hey, I know what would be really fun to try at work today: let’s all spend hours trying to find a needle in a haystack! When you can’t see where your cabling is, and what exactly you have, you end up wasting countless hours trying to find cables you didn’t even know you have (or didn’t have) in the first place.
Why invest in cable management for the cables inside and outside of your plant? The bigger question is: why haven’t you already invested in cable management?
When you don’t have cable management in place, you can end up with major headaches:
- Used ports that are not providing any services
- Cables going through trays that are only occupying space
- Fiber strands that supposedly carry traffic that could be assigned to some other service
- A percentage of equipment that is supporting infrastructure that does nothing…. Yikes!
Here’s how things improve WITH cable management in place:
- No more zombie cables…and no more unused ports.
- No more underused equipment — such as fiber strands that could be used elsewhere.
- No more wasted money on equipment you already had but lost track of somewhere.
- No more unnecessary downtime (and stress).
- No more hunting down needles in haystacks.
As a software vendor offering both an inside and outside plant solution (DCIM and Outside Plant), we’ve seen firsthand how transformative proper management is for our users. netTerrain helps you document your fiber, copper, tray and power cables; it can be used for cable management for both an Inside and Outside Plant.
What is Inside Plant and Outside Plant?
Inside Plant (ISP) is: all of the cabling and equipment installed inside a building. This includes copper or fiber cabling — as well the associated equipment which services the communications inside the building.
Within an Inside Plant management software such as netTerrain you can manage your assets and connectivity from equipment rooms to the workstations, printers, and phones. See your cables branch out from fiber patch panels to the associated floors and rooms. Simply create your own floor diagrams, using a map grid or import a floor plan. Manage your telco closets racks and floor plans, and easily trace the port to port connections and locate your network equipment.
Outside Plant (OSP) is: the communication infrastructure outside of a building, within an organization’s campus, community, or regions.
An outside plant management software, such as netTerrain OSP, will allow organizations to document, manage, and maintain its fiber network infrastructure.
This includes:
- showing fiber splices,
- equipment inside manholes and handholes,
- and GIS maps to auto-position equipment, based on Long/Lat coordinates.
- ….and netTerrain OSP will soon have the capability to generate the available routes for new cables too!
When you invest in comprehensive cable management software, you have the ability to view full connectivity paths including the inside and outside plant hierarchies for each segment. netTerrain offers just that: an Inside and Outside Plant solution for organizations needing to document it cabling infrastructure. Bottomline? You don’t have to deal with the stress, costs, and inefficiency caused by too much IT stuff and not enough IT insights. Take back your cabling today…..