Install Cross-Connects and Lab Areas with Ease
Aug 17 '01
The Bottom Line Rack mounted hubs, a modern day miracle for network administrators serving a datacenter or enterprise lab environment.
Often in businesses and educational institutions, a large number of computer nodes or devices will be placed together in one area in order to best serve the needs of the network's users. When this happens, there will almost always be a number of wall ports that lead back through the walls to a punch-down panel that concentrates all of the outgoing wall and floor connections into a panel of connector interfaces. That is all well and good but in order to really connect your network, what you need is a hub.
A hub itself is merely a device which concentrates a number of node connections at one place so that all nodes can see the traffic of any other node connection. This allows many computers in relatively near proximity (in other words, in the same network segment, unseparated by a bridge or router) to be able to see each other and transmit to each other via the hub. There are two main kinds of hubs, active hubs and passive hubs.
Passive hubs merely allow a common place for communications to be concentrated and set over the connections to the connected nodes. They do not work with the transmissions in any way, they simply propogate the packets of data in whatever form they come in and send them in whatever form they go out, often providing an access light or indicator where traffic has been sent or recieved.
Active hubs do the same job that passive hubs do but they also work as repeaters to regenerate the signal that they have recieved. Ordinarily, 100BaseT UTP connections are only spec'd to travel 100 meters before they become too garbled by outside interference. In some situations, such as excessive exposure to flourescent lighting or perpendicularly placed power cables can cause an accelerated pattern of attenuation degredation in the signal. By implementing an active hub, you can concentrate the signals to be forwarded to another hub, switch, bridge, or router while regenerating and strengthening the signal at the same time. This sort of hub is also known as a concentrator.
Reguardless of the type of hub that one requires for thier particular configuration, rackmount hubs allow an extended manageablilty and convienience especially in an environment where the hub is providing cabling services for rackmounted routers, bridges, or servers. Rack-mounted hubs allow one to concentrate node connections into a single space which then can be dealt with by implementing cable management solutions.
There are, however, several small annoying details that one will encounter when installing a rack mounted hub and they are as follows: 1) You encounter cable management problems on the basis of a large number of cables in the same place. Even with the help of cable management attachments for the rack that the hub is mounted on, you will often run into problems identifying which cable goes where and is plugged into which port if you do not tag the individual cables. 2) Because the hub in question is a rack mount, it has the same potential problems that a rack mounted server or other internetworking device would have: simply stated, it generates and retains heat. Heat on electronic parts can have a detrimental impact on the life of the device and the devices around it. and 3) A hub requires power to function and a high density of power-requiring devices as are mounted in a rack can cause power problems if the area the rack is in is not properly set up to handle such a problem.
Rack mounted hubs offer us, as network admnistrators, a level of service and convience previously unparalleled particularly in a data center or enterprise computing evironment. They concentrate cables and internetworking devices into the same area so as to cut down on time required to locate a device for administration. At the same time, however, one must be able to deal with cable tracing either by labling each cable from a node with an identifier signalling where that cable is from or by being able to trace the cable itself. Also, one must thing ahead at heat and power considerations for rack mounted devices, taking into account environmental factors and local power circuits. A rackmounted hub can be a blessing or a curse depending on how skillfully it is installed and implemented.
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