In an active data center or telecommunications room, even a simple port change at the rack can be telling. The speed and confidence of the response quickly reveal whether cable organization is supporting—or hindering—day-to-day operations.
When cable management discipline slips, tasks that should take minutes can easily consume half an hour, increasing risk, downtime, and operational friction.
For ICT infrastructure expert Tom Cabral, Field Applications Engineer, Chatsworth Products, scenes like this are all too familiar. After decades of troubleshooting issues in active network environments, he’s learned one simple truth: cable management isn’t about appearances—it’s about maintaining efficiency and control at the rack.
In this post, we sat down with Tom to talk through what he’s seen in the field—the common mistakes, how teams fix them, and what others can learn before they face the same challenges.
“Why does cable management break down in the first place?”
Tom: Nobody sets out to build a mess. People are moving fast. They’re understaffed. They’re responsible for more systems than ever. The phrase I hear constantly is, “It was only supposed to be temporary.”
The problem is, temporary never stays temporary in a live network. Once something is plugged in, it’s carrying traffic. People are using it. Nobody wants the network to go down—not email, not Wi-Fi, not phones, not anything. So that “temporary” cable stays right where it is.
Another big factor is turnover. Visions change. Standards drift. You can literally walk through a data center and see leadership changes just by looking at how the cables are routed. One section follows a clear discipline. Another looks like everyone just did what they had to do to get through the day.
Photo: Disorganized cabling reduces visibility, serviceability, and available workspace.
“When do most teams realize cable management has become a problem?”
Tom: Most people don’t call us after the first add, move, or change. They call after the third or fourth—when they hit a wall.
Suddenly every change feels painful, risky, and slow. That’s when they say, “We’ve got to do something about this mess.”
Other times, they don’t call about cables at all—they call about something else.
One call that always sticks with me was a large company that said their equipment was overheating and asked if we could help with airflow. They assumed the problem was tiles, CRAC units, or something mechanical in the room.
When I walked in, it was immediately clear what was happening. The backs of the servers were completely blocked. Cables were draped right across the exhaust fans, piled so tightly you couldn’t even see the fan housings anymore.
On top of that, they were using large cable management arms on the backs of the servers—big metal assemblies designed to move with the server when it slides out. The arms were doing exactly what they were designed to do but unfortunately they were also blocking almost every airflow path out of the cabinet.
The fans were essentially pushing air straight into a wall of cable. That created back pressure, slowed the fans down, heated the equipment up, and triggered alarms.
We didn’t add cooling, and we didn’t touch the HVAC. We re-dressed the cables to the sides of the cabinet, removed the obstructions, maintained proper bend radius, and restored a clear path for air to move out of the back of the equipment. Once the cables were routed correctly, the overheating issue went away.
Photo: Clear airflow restored by correcting cable routing.
“What’s one mistake you see over and over?”
Tom: Underestimating how much space cables actually take up.
Modern cables are thicker than they used to be, and performance expectations are higher. You need room for proper bend radius, separation, and enough space to work inside the manager without crushing anything. If you don’t account for that early—or adapt as environments change—space quietly becomes the failure point.
This shows up even more with technologies like voice over IP and PoE. They introduce real physical requirements around bundling, spacing, and heat. With PoE in particular, spacing and separation aren’t just best practice—they’re enforceable by code.
When people call to spec new jobs, they’ll often point to a six-inch manager. But once I start walking them through the math—how many patch panels, how many connections, and how much bundle space each cable actually needs—you can see the realization start to land. I’ll say, “You’re already past 50 percent fill—and that’s before your next expansion.”
I’ve never had anyone come back and say, “We chose cable managers that were too wide.” What I hear instead is, “I wish we had just a few more inches.”
“What can (and can’t) be fixed live?”
Tom: In one case, a company called us because the cable managers were so overfilled that the doors wouldn’t latch.
Cables were bulging out, fingers were completely buried, and there was no room left to work. They had simply outgrown the space, but nobody noticed until it became impossible to ignore.
They weren’t doing anything “wrong” day to day. They were adding connections as needed, using whatever cable lengths were on hand, and pushing slack wherever it would fit. Over time, the fill ratio crept past 50 percent, then eventually past 100 percent.
By the time it surfaced as a problem, the network was live and business critical. In that situation, ripping everything out and starting over wasn’t an option.
So, we worked within the constraints they had. We removed the existing cable fingers and replaced them with custom extended fingers that effectively moved the cable pathway forward. The goal was to “give them a cavity”—more surface area and depth—so the cables had somewhere to live again.
Once they had that space back, we advised the customer to start systematically replacing long patch cords with shorter ones during planned outages, because removing excess slack would free up even more room.
Photo: Years of growth pushed cable managers past their limits—doors wouldn’t close, fingers were buried, and serviceability was lost.
“What is a small decision that causes big long-term headaches?”
Tom: Too much slack. That’s probably the easiest one to point to.
Someone needs a three-foot cable, but they’ve got a seven-foot cable on the shelf. So, they plug it in, shove the extra into the cable manager, close the door, and move on. It feels harmless in the moment. But that door opens again someday—and when it does, everything comes spilling out.
Shorter cables make a bigger difference than people realize. They take up less space, they’re easier to route correctly, and they let you maintain proper bend radius without forcing things into tight turns. They also help with airflow, because you’re not packing excess cable into places it doesn’t belong.
Long cables don’t look like a problem when you install them. The problem shows up later, when the space is gone, the doors won’t close, and every change becomes harder than it should be.
Photo: Excess cable slack from leaves little room for proper routing or future changes.
“What do you wish people knew?”
Tom: I wish more people knew that they’re not stuck with what they have.
A lot of the calls I get start with, “We should have planned this better,” and there’s this assumption that the only way forward is a full rip-and-replace. That’s almost never an option anyway because the network is live and nobody can afford the downtime.
What surprises people is that there are retrofittable ways to regain control without tearing everything out. You can add pathway. You can extend fingers. You can create more usable space and restore order without unplugging half the rack. It may take more labor and a bit more planning, but it’s possible.
“What advice do you give teams for planning ahead?”
Tom: I usually boil it down to three things:
- Choose a wider cable manager than you think you need. When there isn’t enough space, people start cheating—not because they’re careless, but because they have no choice. Cables get shoved wherever they’ll fit. Bend radius gets ignored. And then when something goes wrong, everyone’s pointing fingers at the installer or the last person who touched it, even though the real problem was that there was never enough room to do it right.
- Be disciplined. Decide upfront what cable lengths you’re going to use and how cables are supposed to be routed and then stick to that standard. Temporary fixes are how permanent problems start. Every time someone says,“I’ll clean it up later,” that cleanup almost never happens.
- Fix problems as soon as you see them. The longer a bad connection sits, the harder it is to justify going back and cleaning it up. One messy cable turns into five, then ten, and suddenly nobody wants to touch the rack at all because it feels too risky.
“From your perspective, why does CPI approach cable management differently?”
Tom: The short answer is simple: it’s our bread and butter.
We didn’t add cable management later as an accessory. It’s been core to CPI’s offerings from the beginning, and that history shows up in the details—especially the ones most vendors overlook.
One of my favorite examples of this attention to detail is when one of our product managers made changes to how our gate-style managers open. That might sound small, but it’s huge in the field.
You’re standing there with live cables, limited space, and you need access without pulling everything apart. The gate opens the way you naturally approach the rack. That’s someone thinking about real people doing real work.
That’s why CPI cable managers tend to feel more forgiving in the field. Our cable managers are wider for a reason. The fingers are shaped the way they are for a reason. The gates swing the way they do for a reason. All of it is designed so that when you come back for the third or fourth change, you’re not fighting the system.
Cable Management Designed with Intent
Tom’s perspective makes one thing clear: the difference between cable management that works and cable management that struggles often comes down to whether the infrastructure was designed to support change, growth, and real-world conditions from the start.
If you’re planning a new space, expanding an existing one, or inheriting a room that’s already under strain, it’s worth understanding the options available to you—before small compromises turn into hard limits.
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