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**cellersick** · January 13, 2017, 05:35 PM

I've found the issue similar to working with / scheduling door hardware. For my purposes, I find it useful to have 3 major (generic) family types - net racks, cabinets, and wire managers (which mimics the way our clients view these items). This gets the size blocked out in the model and can provide an electrical connector if desired. ALL the other details about the rack are left outside of Revit. There's just too many configurations to deal with inside of Revit. Where is the power coming from, is there a PDU or is there a UPS in the rack? Are the racks part of a aisle containment system? What about the gear inside the RUs, how would you catalog that? If required, I would suggest doing individual rack configuration in a spreadsheet, calculating the rack totals in the spreadsheet, and linking that info back into appropriate parameters.

**Twiceroadsfool** · January 13, 2017, 05:35 PM

I have them here, and they are heavvvvyyyyyy. LOL. But thats because i made all of the equipment Shared and Nested, so i can track Asset data about them, hehehehe. And, naturally, they are a bit over-detailed/over-modeled, because i like them that way. =)

Family Type parameters for the devices inside them. Devices themselves (switches, serverblades, etc) are "detailed" but not obscene. At one point i considered making each Jack nested/shared, for data tracking. But honestly... No one is ever going in to a revit model to fill that crap out.

**Twiceroadsfool** · January 13, 2017, 06:18 PM

Admittedly would have looked cooler with the cables in it. This one is configure all for networking. Mater ill have to swap in the server blades and swap some equipment out.

The switches in the Content are the UNIFI line, since thats what i used in my Office. The patch panels are pretty standard, lol. The server blades are modeled on something older, i want to say Dell Poweredge. Just what i had cut sheets for laying around last time i needed Gear. =)

Attached Files

2017-01-13_13-16-53-NetworkGear.png (69.2 KB, 196 views)

**Andrew K** · January 13, 2017, 06:51 PM

Thanks for the replies!

Do you ever detail or do assembly-esque callouts on the racks in elevation views? Would you see benefit in a model tag rather than internal geometry for the components in elevation? Or is it mostly "How many of X do we need, and which racks are they in"?

I'd imagine doing data connectors for every jack is not a common thing, especially when it can go over 48 connectors for one component.

**Twiceroadsfool** · January 13, 2017, 08:05 PM

Im not sure what you mean by a *model tag,* honestly. Do you just mean a tag saying what the items are? I have that already, because i have family type selectors on the different components. The Rack is a piece of equipment with up to 50 nested objects, that can be swapped out. So they can be tagged, and they look different in elevations and renderings.

**cellersick** · January 13, 2017, 08:16 PM

Unless your racks are as simple as the one Twiceroadsfool posted, you will want to do it outside of Revit. For example, entire racks (and their servers) can be proprietary (communication equipment especially). A data center could purchase a system that is 24 racks big that is delivered in cabinets that will be part of a cold-aisle containment system that uses the cabinet structure. They will place and maintain those racks as a unit. They might also have a section of the whitespace that is reserved for non-dedicated servers (that's where you'd look for "how many of X do we need?"). I can appreciate that the "patch panels are pretty standard, lol", but the data center guys would vehemently disagree with that.

I think the need for data centers is far far beyond what you should consider doing in Revit.

**Twiceroadsfool** · January 13, 2017, 08:25 PM

I meant *MY* patch panels are pretty standard, meaning that- in the parallax office- i bought fairly barebone's Patch Panels, and thats what the equipment was modeled after. The type of serious setup that cellersick is talking about, i wouldnt even be involved in modeling. I used my content to model in server and networking equipment for a Network Ops Center, that was for a Design Project. Certainly not for planning out the Comm Gear.

**Andrew K** · January 13, 2017, 08:49 PM

Sorry for not being more clear, as this part of the industry isn't something that comes up every day for me. What I meant by 'model tag' was masking the space each component takes up and having an annotation with a brief description of what that thing is. See RackLayout.

Or if people generally do something closer to rack-sample, where they do callouts and leave the geometry simple but visible.

I'm looking more at the component end rather than the physical racks themselves.

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**Twiceroadsfool** · January 13, 2017, 08:57 PM

IMHO, the colored images would just be done with tags, on the individual nested/shared pieces. Thats how mine work, anyway. For doing basic Cabinet layout like that, they work fine.

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