Patch cables are an afterthought, but the don’t have to be.

You nitpick over datasheets and demos and reviews for everything in your infrastructure, picking and choosing the perfect product to fit your needs. But for your cables, you just grab the same box of blue patch cables in varying lengths that you get every time.

Before you make that next purchase, you have to ask, “Why blue?” You can get pink, purple, red, yellow, orange, and a multitude of other colors from a supplier and you always choose blue.  Your cables have been a missed opportunity to add value to your network that has been passed up for too long.

So go crazy and grab some colors! Your wireless VLAN can have yellow patch cables. Your management VLAN can be red. Uplinks? Hot pink of course, use whatever works for you and before long with some careful planning and change control (we’ll talk about this at another time) your maze of blue cables in your switch closet turns into meaningful visual information about your network that wasn’t there before.

At a glance you know that the switch that died last night has a printer on it that needs to move to an active switch before staff comes in. That switch stack down the hall? You know that marketing isn’t affected by the upgrade that’s happening this weekend and they don’t need to be included in the email string. Troubleshooting an access issue?

With a quick peek you see their office is in the sales VLAN instead of marketing.

Now you’ve added useful information to your network and what did it cost you? Just a bit of time, and a little bit of color.