This Week: Beyond CCNA

We dedicated this week to the single-most contentious room in your office, the server room. Within that hopefully not-too-hot room lives the heartbeat of your business, represented by rows of rapidly blinking lights.

CBT Nuggets courses like Cisco CCNA can teach you the basics about routing and switching, but it'll take a few years of managing bare metal to really understand that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. We have a few tips on how to avoid the most common problems in your server room.

• Cable Management Should Be a Process, Not a Project There are many server room horror stories out there. Floods. UPC failures. Dead fans. Squirrels. The one-off horrors are endless, but the single most common server room horror stories involve cables: The tangled mess that no one wants to unravel. That's the reason cable management needs to part of the process, otherwise, it won't even be a project.

• 4 Steps for Fixing a Neglected Server Room We've all been there. The server room nightmare. Unbalanced power supplies? Check. Nests of cables? Definitely. Physical security? Nonexistent. Squirrels? Almost certainly. If you're brave enough, here are the steps you need to take to fix a neglected server room and how to keep it that way when you're done.

• Beyond CCNA: Into the Server Room with Jeremy Cioara In this 30-minute webinar, you'll follow Jeremy into actual server rooms, crawlspaces, and behind the walls at actual job sites to see how the pros build a switch network. Often, IT pros experience a huge gap between network certification training and real-world application of skills. CBT Nuggets trainer Jeremy Cioara closes the gap with his new IT Expertise course.

• 3 Ways to Grow Your Server Room with Your Business Even in the Cloud Age, you probably still have a bare-metal server, IDF or MDF in a room somewhere. You still have to get to the internet, don't you? If that's the case, then you're not totally free of a server room, and that means you'll need to grow your cabinet along with your business. Here are some best practices.

• Convincing Your Boss to Buy New Equipment with Finance Math In finance, there are a number of expenditures relevant to an IT department. Operating expenses are the everyday costs of keeping the lights on. Capital expenditures (i.e., the big purchases) are typically the ones that get rejected off the bat. What if you could convince your boss that a big purchase could easily pay for itself in operating costs?