Patch Panel/Wiring Question

[WiLL-I-Am]

The reason I am asking this is because I am an amateur, so if it is obvious to you, it's not to me, so please explain.

I saw this picture and I panicked a little bit,

1. First of all I know older patch panels had two sides one side that you punch the Ethernet in and the other side is where the actual feeder/port of the Ethernet is, these new models have port on both sides, so you don't have to punch things in, is that true?

2. where are the switches/routers in this picture? do they installed all the patch panels on one rack and switch/routers will be on the next rack?

3. can you help me figure where all those patch cables are going, that I marked up?, which one goes to the switches, which one goes to the building rooms?(ofc this is not your design, me neither, just make a guess, it helps me understand the typical pattern of these

[Leo Laohoo]

2. Switch could be below the picture
3. Top of the rack

[Seb Rupik]

I'd agree with both of @Leo Laohoo answers. Regarding the RJ45 patch panel, the type you are describing is called a 'through coupler'.

https://www.comms-express.com/products/excel-24-port-cat5e-patch-panel-1u-rj45-through-coupler/

Personally with structured cabling you would normally opt for a 110 termination at the rear of the patch panel. You'd only use a through coupler to perhaps hide a bundle of different premade cables of different lengths and present a more uniform way of patching those cables to your servers in the rack.

cheers,

Seb.

[Martin L]

1. yes; since there is no typical punch side, cables could go to networking devices or towards end-users devices
2. all cables seems to be going down, so I guess switches/routers are down below patch
3. cables 1 seems to be fiber optics; those are good for longer distances (over 100 meters) so my guess is that those are connecting other Com rooms; Blue Cat 5 cables are limited to 100 meter distance (typically 90 m), so those are going to network devices

note: most of Comm rooms are not so clean and neat; most of them are messy. this looks like a promo photo fro new install

[WiLL-I-Am]

One more question,

How do enterprise networks usually manage the console connections to the network devices in, do they use Cisco access servers? and is it per rack? can you put the model that usually being used?

[Seb Rupik]

I typically come across different flavours of avocent terminal servers:

https://www.kvm-switches-online.com/avocent-acs-8000.html

cheers,

Seb.