Reminds me of this:<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FY1XB0rrYes" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FY1XB0rrYes</a><p>The cabling looks so perfect it kinda seems a little alien even.
That was uncomfortable watching - having been responsible for data centers in a past life my nightmares were haunted by those with no, or worse, little knowledge re-patching critical infrastructure.
This puts the focus in the wrong place.<p>When wiring a rack, you've got to start with an understanding of what you want each piece to do. If you have a switch where all the ports are untagged or on a common VLAN, the only thing which matters about cable placement in the switch is how easy it is to trace later on. If you have multiple VLANs, you need to have a map right there in front of you saying how the ports are assigned.<p>On the physical level, dealing with intermittent connectivity issues (cable not plugged in properly, cable damaged by mechanical stress) and difficulty extracting cables (RJ45 lock lever too small or stuck) are relatively common issues that won't be adequately simulated in VR anytime soon.
I really want to co-opt this to create a "physical" representation of my VmWare or Xen environments. Could be a really interesting way to demonstrate virtual appliances and networking haha
I wish real cables behaved like that but that's not what actually happens. The worst is their tendency to coil which happens when different layers of the cable are twisted and exerting twisting force with regards to each other.
Similar to cloth physics, except it's 1D.<p>E.g. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=04nXlhdPxB4" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=04nXlhdPxB4</a>
It is not clear to me what the intention is with this stuff.<p>I mean, in a datacenter, aren't there "top of rack" switches that everything below gets cabled into and then you have the top-of-rack switches aggregating traffic into fiber and the fiber going into a much larger central switch?<p>Where in a datacenter do you have to worry about patch-panel concerns unless one is routing to testing tools of some kind?
Would be fun to hook this up to crossbow or another robust virtual network stack. Virtually wire up virtual networking. Throw in a little virtual PDA to configure and spin up new VMs (spawning them into rack on demand).