[crispyambulance]

It is not clear to me what the intention is with this stuff.

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?

Where in a datacenter do you have to worry about patch-panel concerns unless one is routing to testing tools of some kind?

[peterwwillis]

I don't know the intention, but there are a lot of different use cases for cabling. It's not always top of rack, it's not always in a data center, it's not even always in a rack. And certainly not everyone uses fiber backbones.