Sergeant Clip in the Datacenter

The data centre is more prevalent than anything for VLANs and patching correctly – this is also a key place for them.

The Sergeant Clip is designed to be used where switches need removed fast and efficiently with minimal downtime and no errors!

The Sergeant Clip can remove manual error by keeping the cables in the correct order and making it re-patching in the correct order foolproof.

Think of the cost of an engineer per hour – a few hours to replace – and downtime in the environment whilst being replaced – if you can reduce that time, errors and engineer re-visits it has to be a winner.

The replacement of a switch will be reduced by up to 75% and will significantly reduce the need for revisits due to incorrect patching, it will become a thing of the past.

Example 1:

A Large Outsourcing company runs a 24×7 contact centre operation.  Their switching environment uses a stack of 3750 series switches, and within one of these stacks, two switches had failed due to a power spike which had rendered them useless.  The Switches had various VLAN’s defined for Printers, VoIP Phones, and PCI and non-PCI data zones, so care had to be taken to ensure that the patch cabling was reconnected to the correct port on the correct switch.  Rather than spend time labelling each cable individually, the engineer took two minutes to fit four 12-port Sergeant Clips to each switch, and these were marked up to show which switch and bank of ports they belonged to.  Cabling was then removed, and the switches replaced inside 15 minutes, and service was resumed faultlessly.  The engineer estimated that using the Sergeant Clips saved him over an hour of downtime, and the business was able to continue running their service with a much reduced outage window.

Example 2:

In an Impact Level 4 environment, a company has “sticky” MAC addressing enabled on their switches, to prevent foreign and potentially untrusted devices from being connected to the Network.  This means that in order to replace a blade within a Chassis switch, the cables MUST be reconnected to the same port or the Network ports would not come up.  Rather than run the risk of clearing the sticky MAC addresses associated with ports on a blade.  Using a number of Sergeant Clip’s reduced the potential for erroneous patching and subsequent troubleshooting to zero.

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