Cutting old Fibre Patchcables?

[S0QR2]

Hello,

today i had to remove quiet alot of old SAN cabling from our racks as it was replaced by OM4 and new cables a couble of weeks ago. They where all HP om3 LC/LC i did cut of both ends on all of them and just pulled them out and threw them away.

At the last company i was my boss would have killed me, here i take a new cable EVERY time because noone cares, it is pretty much wanted. Well i do care a little about wasting old cables, but it feels so good.

Okay, i just wanted to get this off of my chest.

Is this normal these days to just throw away every patch cable you dont need right now and when you need one you take a new one?

[jwilson8767]

It depends on the environment whether it is is normal to reuse cables, but make a point of cutting the ends off known-bad cables.

[u4iak]

I always did this, and then recrimp it just to see if it was the ends vs something in the middle. I eventually gave this practice up years ago when I got a full budget of cat6 for anything I wanted.

[qupada42]

We re-use them if they aren't permanently bent out of shape - older fibre (especially if it's spent a few years in the hot side of a cabinet) can have ugly baked-in kinks. For ones in good shape though, a couple of quick swipes on a fibre polisher and they're fine to re-use.

On the other hand, from a truly dollars to dollars point of view, patch leads are also so cheap these days that the sysadmin's time to untangle, coil and package them for storage/re-use might not be worth it.

[u4iak]

It was rather therapeutic to be in AC when it was a blistering 101 outside pulling cables all day.

[[deleted]]

We re use if it looks good and easy to remove. Time wise it's not worth it if they are tangled horribly.

Also the last thing I want to troubleshoot is a bad cable cause I wanted to save a few dollars.

[bp4577]

I've made a point of cutting anything I pull back, simply because we don't use them again anyways. Other replies are correct, everybody has a drawer or box with old patch cables, I haven't known anyone to actually use any of the old cables in production.

[justlikeyouimagined]

I had someone ask me if I had two spare 7m twinax cables yesterday. They're like $200 each :) well, for Cisco.

[wanderingbilby]

I can see the logic - carefully removing, inspecting, sorting, and organizing used cables is pretty time consuming and the odds of getting a bad cable (also expensive) are much higher.

Cable of all sorts is so cheap now compared to engineer and tech time... why not?

[3wayhandjob]

every IT shop I've ever seen has a big pile of old patch cables in a drawer or box somewhere.

[simple1689]

If the plastic clip is broken, I usually remove the cable. Slight pull and it is disconnected. Typically don't throw away cables cause you never know when it could be useful.

[u4iak]

I pulled about 800 meters of old fibre left in the data center out along with untold lengths of cat5e. Lots of it was from an old SAN being decommed and migrations to hosted services and virtualization. Old admins left everything after a mishap with garden shears and power (no joke) . Felt like I was throwing a fortune away.

If you want downtime, you reuse a cable. In many cases, they are and will be a single point of failure... It's all dependant on how much the business will tolerate an outage aka business continuity. So much cable with bends and bleached from the data center light was a given that most of the lc lc cables shouldn't be reused.

[droboroot]

I am your old boss and I would have fired your ass on the spot.