RAM | Reseller Advocate Magazine: Issue 66

By Chris Angelini

We devote a lot of effort to understanding the latest technologies. Then we take a step further and apply those technologies to the products you buy and sell. But it's the reseller's job to bridge that last gap between getting a storage server or media center system from its box to its home in the rack or home theater enclosure.

Frustration is understandable when you dedicate your valuable time to reading up on a given technology or trend, researching the derivative products, and finally get the hardware in-house, only to finish the setup process with a messy or incomplete jumble of wires. You might counter that hands-on experience is the only way to learn the ropes, but I've seen enough permutations of hardware and software to know there will always be an unaccounted variable throwing its wrench into your clockwork. No two installations are the same. Experience only takes you so far.

There are ways to clean things up, though, whether you're working in a rack, in front of a router, or inside of a server. You want to put your best foot forward professionally. You want to maximize the margin on your solution sales. And you want to simplify service as much as possible once the job is done. A reseller using the right cables can really dress things up, build in a lot of extra margin, and optimize cooling and circulation to keep hardware running smoothly. No matter where you're working or how many times you've done it before, being a master of cabling has the potential to pay off big.

Wiring Neat Racks

You'll laugh, but there was once a time when I'd run CAT5 cable along walls, from the switch to each client. It wasn't pretty, but I got the job done. Then I went on-site to an office being built within a warehouse. Even after the walls had been plastered and finished, a couple of older gentlemen took one day to go in and install four-way RJ-45 jacks onto walls in each room. They also ran cabling from the jacks to a central location with a patch panel and from that panel to a simple SOHO switch. Everything was tied together. Most of the time you didn't even see wires, and when you did, they were simple patch cables running from jack to jack. From then on, I decided sub-contractors were the way to go, not only for my own sanity but because, in the end, the customer benefitted from fewer billed hours and better end results.

To this day, that's still the route to take for any reseller putting in new wiring. Of course, unless network cabling is one of your fortes, you probably leave a lot of that inside-the-wall and patch panel work to someone with more telephony experience able to get the job done quickly. However, apply the same principles of neatness to network cabling in racks. The last time I built up a 24U box, I slid in servers anywhere they'd fit, thinking that by spreading things out, I was doing a service to the rack's modest cooling system. "Actually, a lot of customers build racks from the bottom up," says Brian Baltezore, product marketing manager for Belkin International. "They put their heaviest hardware, such as power protection, at the bottom. Servers might go above that and networking hardware at the very top to avoid building top-heavy enclosures. We'll see the rackmount hardware installed, one next to the other, with the smallest 6" patch cables linking them."

So you keep things tight to minimize the number of wires running from one end of the rack to the other. You buy precisely measured patch cables in order to avoid wound up runs of wiring coiled up back there. And you take the patch cable route instead of cutting your own cables because it saves time and maximizes reliability, according to Belkin. "Typically, VARs are interested in our cabling due to ease of deployment," says Belkin's Baltezore. "Less time in the installation means more money to them, which leads to perhaps the biggest point when it comes to cables in general: margin. We'll enhance their blended margin in a very competitive space. They might earn a few points on servers and network hardware. Cables have a higher margin, increasing what the reseller makes."

Baltezore also talks about how he sometimes sees a lot of resistance when it comes to pricing solutions with a full complement of cables, since by adding $500 in cables, deals are often at risk of being undercut by another VAR. Of course, when the time comes to install hardware, the other VAR is still going to need cabling to hook everything up. The final solution will cost even more if your competition has to run somewhere to buy it. This is an education deal. Customers need to know that cabling is an important part of any infrastructure job. Do yourself and your customers a favor by not submitting any estimates without cabling factored in and suitably explained. If you do, both of you will be paying for it later.

So you part out a new rack, a couple of servers, battery backup, and networking hardware. You might have a general idea how far each piece will be away from everything else, but without the hardware installed and ready to go, there's no way to know for sure. And by that point, the cabling was needed yesterday. How do you dig up an 8" run here, a 13" run there, and not lose your mind?

According to to Baltezore, "Resellers can work with the distributor partners or Belkin directly. The VAR calls their point of contact here, says, ‘Hey, this is what we need,' we get as many points of detail as we can get, and we turn the price around same-day. It's all based on lead time. We can build here or in Asia, saving even more money for VARs planning ahead." Gigabit hardware is already within the price range of many SMBs. And although Gigabit runs well enough over CAT5e cabling, any new server room you wire today should have CAT6, if only for the future-proofing it enables. Mash up the aesthetic and functional benefits of neat cabling, higher margins, and a newer wiring standard. The differences between a neatly wired rack and rookie job are astounding—take it from someone who has seen (and worked in) both.

Cabling Storage Systems

If you were under the impression that the latest serial storage technologies were going to eliminate cabling confusion, you'd be wrong. Yes, the wires are much skinnier and a lot more durable without all of those pins to bend, but certain devices employ one serial connector while others use another, making cabling a bit of a nightmare. You have internal interfaces that link to individual drives, connections that hook up to backplanes, expanders, and port multipliers plus an array of fan-out cables. Then you have the external cables to think about. Between the controller cards, chassis, expanders, and drives, there are a ton of different permutations. Generally, the controller vendors will include one type of cable in their kits. Drives sometimes come with one direct-to-direct cable as well. So how're you supposed to get the cables you actually need, install them, and keep things organized?

Hoping for a better idea of how to address the complicated world of serial storage cabling, I called Tom Kodet, storage adapter business development at LSI Logic, who admitted that LSI, along with several other vendors, has been working on a solution to what has become a complex issue.

Take the question of which cable to include in a controller card kit as an example. If LSI Logic sells a SAS card and includes the typical mini-SAS fan-out cable with four SAS connectors, the card has no problem interfacing with either SAS or SATA drives, both designed to co-exist in a SAS infrastructure. But backplanes don't work with the integrated power and data orientation of a SAS cable. Instead, they use familiar 7-pin SATA cables for data and route power through standard four-pin connectors straight from the power supply.

On the other hand, a mini-SAS connector branching out into standard SATA connectors turns out to be more flexible, ironically enough. It'll attach to SAS and SATA backplanes as well as SATA hard drives directly. But the same cable won't hook up to SAS drives, taking it out of contention in SAS controller kits. Clearly, LSI Logic and Adaptec, which serve a large contingent of SMBs excited about mixing SAS and SATA in the same chassis, have a lot of cabling confusion to sort out. So why the big emphasis on kits if they're limited by application?

"The tricky part of the cable business is that none of them use distributors," says LSI's Kodet. "Because of the huge number of SKUs, cables just don't lend themselves to distribution. That's why distributors like to see kits with cards and cables in a single box."

If the cable you need isn't available in a kit, then, it's up to the reseller to track it down. An online vendor such as Technical Cable Concepts, Inc. might be just the ticket for VARs who don't already have a quick solution provider. Those that do are likely already working around the complexities of connecting cards to backplanes to drives given a number of different connector standards and corresponding cable combinations.

AMCC has maneuvered its way around the frustrations of matching one end to another by turning attention to its own cable offerings. "In addition to our storage solutions, we're focusing on cabling and making it a value-add rather than a liability," says Scott Cleland, director of marketing for AMCC. "At this point, we have something like 12 multi-lane cables that combine four ports into a single connection. Those cables give you internal connectivity from a controller to either drives or a backplane. But they do so using just one cable that locks down, improves airflow, and cuts back on cable count."

AMCC's designs aren't proprietary. They're based on the same standards used by everyone else. The difference is in how the cable is packaged. Granted, AMCC has an advantage in that it's creating solutions only intended to go into SATA boxes, so it doesn't have to worry about SAS interoperability. With that said, the popularization of enterprise-class SATA drives makes AMCC's solution one that SMBs will certainly want to think about, especially as they pursue tiered storage strategies.

The one caveat is that in order for a multi-lane cable to work in your environment, both ends of the connection need to also be multi-lane. Naturally, AMCC's controllers are designed to work with its cables. But you'll need a multi-lane midplane as well. According to AMCC's Cleland, AIC, Chenbro, Ci Design, and Akiwa all sell compatible platforms, so seek those out if you're looking for a clean cabling solution.

"Competitors of ours have had high-density port count controllers with discrete connectors all along two edges of the controller. Our 24-port card has only three connectors, each branching out into eight discrete drives. It doesn't get much more elegant than that."

Coming Up Cables

Addressing the cabling issue happens on several fronts. Networking and storage are just two of the most pertinent to VARs involved with bigger SMB jobs. Pulling power supply leads out of the way, properly configuring digital home systems, and strategically deploying KVM switches to cut back on clutter are a few others. Spend the time to take care of cabling, and your racks will be more serviceable. Your hardware installations will look more professional, and you'll earn more margin on SMB deployments too.