Rigging and cabling

Rigging of a modern sailing ship is a pretty intricate matter - just look at the rig of Cutty Sark (see miniature model). One would hope not to have to maintain that, but that is exactly what they did. Not only is the rig durable (can take hurricane force winds), not only does it do the job to propel the ship, but it also can be maintained. Imagine that - a rope breaks, and the crew can splice a new one on its place, another one is worn out and they take it off and replace with a new one.

They can do that to running rigging, and also to standing rigging. This is possible to fairly extreme situations - sometimes  it is possibly to rebuild the rig if one or more masts are down after a really bad storm or battle.  Wonderful craftmanship, and really brilliant engineering based on centuries of experience: Whatever your build and send out to sea, the sailor must be able to maintain!


Cabling, on the other hand, is an art form in data centers. If you have something really large like Google does, you can have bespoke servers and cabling can be taken into account in the design. You can see yourself if you  "Take a walk through a Google data center" . There is also a Youtube introductory video - just freeze that when they show the details of server cabling.

In the smaller ones where the rest of us operate you have generally available hardware, and here's where it may get interesting. Here is a photo of an unnamed brand factory integrated rack cabling:

Net cabling, tied well and color coded.

This is really pretty and everyone who sees that is delighted, especially since some results of manual work are, erm, somewhat less tidy. Ooh and aahh, this is great, let's get more of that!
There's been a little note every now and then asking "so how do we replace a broken server if need be". No worries, and so far so good. Until....
It turned out that certain cables need to be replaced. Ouch. Now, to do that, the whole bundle containing data and power cables needs to be opened so that you can sort out what is what. After that the Data Center technician is supposed to put it back together. Unsurprisingly, there are few volunteers for such a task.

The thing that should have happened was to take thing to pieces while it was still 30-odd servers and to check the maintenance capability - that would have been seamanship. Now we are out there, it is blowing near gale, and we just realized the backstays are about to give (so no problem so far) - and we don't know how to put new ones in (baaaaad).

I am sure this anecdote will finish well. In the meanwhile - remember that there will be maintenance and be prepared to take apart everything you put in your server room. That's what sailors do!