Lightest equipment always goes to the top of the rack. Or in other words... patch panels and wire minders for the panels. Heaviest equipment goes to the bottom... Roughly in this order:
Panels
WireMinders
(additonal panels / wire minders)
Switches
Servers
UPS
This is to keep the rack from getting top-heavy and becoming a danger to the IT staff and others.
Diameter of a cable is about 1/4". Area is pi*r^2. This gives an area of about .05"sq per cable, or ... 2.35"sq for 48 cables. Rounding up that about 2.5"sq. Since a 1RU wireminder is usually about 2"sq in the race area a single horizontal wireminder will not hold all 48 cables. Therefore you need to have either two wireminders (One above and one below your 48 port panel) or a larger 2RU wireminder.
Vertical management needs to be accomplished with either side vertical minder loops, or side vertical minder tray. Now... that being said...
How often do you plan to change this layout? If it is not often, forgo the horizontal wireminders, use short patch cables (3') and bundle them in groups of 6 or 12 with velcro strapping. Easy to trace, easy to remove. With that few connections, it doesn't matter that they are not running in a raceway. ( Trust me, I have 2600 runs going to a set of patch panels at my last office. -that- needs wireminders. )
The idea is to keep the cabling neat and easy to manage. Use the same length cable for all the patch interconnects. (e.g. 3' or whatever works for your layout) And color-code the patchs as necessary. (Yellow, workstations, Red Servers, Blue Communications ... whatever you like)
Also buy yourself a roll of self-laminating labels with a sharpie marker and label your patch cables!!!
e.g.
http://www.buyheatshrink.com/dymo-label-writer/rhino-101-label-dispenser.htm Why? Because people will eventually forget that you accidentally disconnected the server, but there'll be he!! to pay on the day that you do it.
If you're going to use wireminders, then as NODISCO shows in his example, I would extend that and put a 1U above the top panel, and a 2U between the two panels. Otherwise that example is typical of most installations.
dh
