Are Access Floors Right For You?

To borrow from Cat Stevens' song, we live in the information age where data is being produced, and consumed, at an astonishing rate.

There are many users of wireless technology:

• Mobile Phones
• Wifi
• Hotspots

Despite the increase of wireless data transmission technology, wired data transmission is on the rise, too.

Walk into your local data center, and nearly all of the data travels over wires or cables, like fiber and Cat6 type cables.

Physical wires, as opposed to wireless technology, provides a layer of physical security that many organizations demand. Not to mention, wired data transmission rates are faster than wireless. (For the most part. Some specialized wireless transmission methods like highly directional microwave can reach incredible transmission speeds, but are pretty specialized).

The need to effectively manage and route cables is becoming more important as society's thirst for data increases.

The old type of access floor was for specific industries, and it looked like it. The most common color for the floor panels is: gray.

It's sort of like what Henry Ford said about car colors, you know, customers could have any color they wanted as long as it was black.

If you manage an office, a library, a 911 Emergency Ops Center, or any number of building types, there's a good chance you don't want your floor to be gray.

Gray is boring, dull and screams "Look at me, I'm boring, and so is this company!"

No, the high tech buildings of the 21st century need to be built with robust infrastructure AND with a keen eye to building aesthetics.

Workers in an office need to be productive AND happy!

Architects and interior designers have the training to make an office productive and inviting to the workers. They work on the design, the furniture, the carpet, lighting and more to make an efficient and welcoming workspace.

One of the challenges these professionals face is fitting all of the data infrastructure into a human-occupied space.

In a data center, humans are an afterthought. They only show up when something goes wrong or new equipment needs to be added. Thus, data centers are big boxes, with no creature comforts. It's all about the data.

With pretty much every other industry, it's about the people. The workers who use the data. The people in marketing, accounting, video production, applications engineers and more. They have huge data requirements, but they are people after all, and they need to be comfortable.

So, a big, heavy gray raised floor isn't going to cut it.

This is why cable management floors are becoming so commonplace in nearly every industry and building type:

• Take up less space (1.5" tall up to 6" tall)
• Have built in cable raceways and electrical boxes (makes it easy to layout workstations and cubicles)
• Accept many different types of floor finishes (Finally, we got rid of the gray finish!)
• Are easy to install, maintain and changeout if needed.

Low profile, cable management floors are often made out of different materials than regular access floors are.

Regular access floors are steel+concrete core panels probably 80%-90% of the time.

With low profile floors, there are more options when choosing the type of material used in the floor panel.

Some common materials are high-strength polypropylene, all-metal, and, of course, the tried-and-true steel+concrete core.

Some raised floor users are used to the standard type of panel, and that's fine. If lightweight and ease of installation and use are important, consider using a panel made from recycled, high-strength polypropylene. In many cases, these types of panels are incredibly strong, despite weighing a fraction of what regular panels do.