Nearly everyday I have a new idea for a product or business and as promised I’m going to begin giving them away. I have hundreds saved up and will begin dropping them at the rate of about two per week so check back frequently. These will always be published in the Ideas category of this blog.
I’ve spent many years in and out of datacenters all across this great nation of ours. Installing enterprise servers, network equipment and storage and there is one thing all datacenters have in common that simply drives all us nerds absolutely batty. Out-of-control messy Cabling!
waterfall of cables
Tracing cables up and down racks, in and out of cages, and under the raised floor while maintaining some degree of confidence that the cable you are about to unplug is in fact the one you started with is a crap-shoot at best and a costly mistake at worst.
A few years ago while removing a few racks of equipment from ATT’s Midwest point of presence near Chicago I actually broke out wire cutters and just went for it. I received a pretty hefty fine but the few grand turned out to be a bargain compared with the couple days of extra work it would have taken to do this “properly”.
It was then that I began shopping for color coded network, power, and fiber optic cables. Yes, you can find a few basic Crayola colored network cables but the power and glass don’t have any options at all. I want to be able to purchase bags of crazy random striped, pok-a-doted multi colored cables. I want to know when I grab a candy-cane cable with green spots that it is the only one in the rack with that pattern and I have 100% confidence that when I walk over to the associated IDX that I’m not taking down the wrong server.
I have come to realize no matter how many dreams like this I have I’m simply never going to make the time to manufacture and market such a product, so here it is. Take it, run with it, and if you make a mint, toss me a thank you.