Equipment Elevation

IRM's Equipment Types allow a mounting space to be defined on the front or rear of the Equipment. The mounting spaces for Equipment instances can be viewed in an Equipment Elevation dialog.

Note: Even though "Elevation" is the name of the dialog for both Rack and non-Rack Equipment, in the following text "Rack Elevation" and "Equipment Elevation" will be used instead to distinguish between the two versions of the Elevation dialog.

The Equipment Elevation dialog shows the front and rear Elevation image of the selected Equipment in 3D, along with any cards in slots and / or any cards placed in mounting spaces. The dialog also displays sections for Equipment, Connections and Statistics & Analysis providing detailed data and statistics about the contained Equipment:

Accessing the dialog

The Elevation dialog is opened by selecting the standard "Elevation..." Equipment context menu option. Which Elevation dialog is opened (Rack Elevation or Equipment Elevation), is decided based on the value of the "is a Rack?" property of the Equipment object:

Design Editor

The main feature of the Equipment Elevation dialog is the central panel -- the Design Editor -- which displays the 3D Elevation model of the selected Equipment and contains additional view and equipment controls, very similarly to the Rack Elevation dialog.

Important: In order for Equipment to appear in the Design Editor properly, the relevant Equipment Type must have either a front or rear Elevation image specified in the Appearance tab:

Observe the following Equipment Elevation example of Front and Back Elevation views for a "Mounting Plate" equipment instance:

each rectangular, colored area in the front and back views represents an individual Rack Space.
There are three in the front
depicted as Red, Green and Blue
and two in the back view.
depicted as Orange and Purple
each Rack Space is then divided into sub-spaces of the same size and a fixed offset, representing Mounting Points
appropriate Equipment is mounted into one or more adjacent Mounting Points

Note: the example below is just for illustrative purposes, demonstrating the range of mounting spaces that can be modeled in IRM, and is not meant to look like any particular kind of real-world Equipment

Key concepts for Equipment Elevation and contrast with Rack Elevation

For an Equipment object to allow other Equipment to be mounted on it, it must have a Mount Point Arrangement in its Equipment Type.
Each Mount Point Arrangement defines the number and geometrical Mount Points that child Equipment can be mounted in.
A single Mount Point Arrangement defines a single (front or rear) "Rack Space", which is simply a region in the front or back of an Equipment object where child Equipment objects can be mounted.
When placing child Equipment into the mounting space in Equipment Elevation, that Equipment snaps to the defined Mount Points defined by the Mount Point Arrangement.
Mounted Equipment can occupy one or more Mount Points that are adjacent either horizontally or vertically.
If an Equipment has a mounting space with child Equipment mounted in it and that parent Equipment is itself mounted in a Rack, the child Equipment is drawn both in the Equipment Elevation for that parent Equipment and in the Rack Elevation for its parent Rack.
To reflect the port state in Equipment Elevation (and also in Rack Elevation), Port Visualization shows the Port State for any Port in the parent and child Equipment both in the Design Editor and in the Statistics and Analysis panel. Such an example can be seen in the screenshot above, where we have a mounted child object, the front view for which shows several different Port states:

Design Editor Controls

The following covers the details of each control in the Design Editor, as listed below:

Pan/zoom and View controls

Ruler controls

Alarm control

Add Equipment and Draw Cable buttons

Add Reservation button

Swap Up / Down / Left / Right controls

Replace and Delete Equipment buttons

Pan / Zoom control and the multi-part view control with front/back toggle button

This control works as described in the Rack Elevation dialog.

Ruler controls

Toggle buttons to show or hide the vertical and horizontal rulers.

Alarm toggle button

Works the same as in Rack Elevation dialog. Below is screenshot image of an example Design Editor with the Alarm button clicked, triggering several equipment in the view being highlighted and blinking, while another click on the same button brings back the Equipment into the original state:

Add Equipment and Draw Cable buttons

The Add Equipment button is used to Add and Place Equipment into a Mount Point.

The Create New Cable is used to inserting Cable objects, which can then be used to connect this or containing Equipment to other Equipment instances.

Add Reservation button

This feature works similarly to reservation in the Rack Elevation dialog; clicking on the button opens a drop down listing available Rack Spaces:

Selecting one creates a special reservation Equipment object, which for Elevation purposes can be manipulated like ordinary Equipment objects (dragged around, deleted, etc.).

In this example, a new mount point reservation has been created in Rack Space "Space A", as can be seen both in the Equipment grid:

and in the Design Editor:

Mount Point reservations work much like Rack reservations, with the main difference being Mount Point sizes are user-defined. Instead of a fixed set of special pre-built Equipment Types, like for the standard Equipment placement, instances of a single special pre-built Equipment Type -- mount point reservation -- are created.

Notice the width and height of that Equipment Type are set to 0:

When an instance of the "mount point reservation" Equipment Type is placed in Equipment Elevation, its size is automatically inherited from the size of the Mount Points in the Rack Space that it's placed in. Therefore, the reservation always properly fits whatever size of Mount Point it's placed in.

Swap controls

This set of buttons enables moving the selected Equipment one Mount Point at a time in each direction (up, down, left and right). The screenshot below shows an example of moving the Front panel one Mount Point position in the Up direction:

However, if you click again on the same button, nothing will happen because the selected Equipment cannot be moved outside the bounds of the Rack Space it's defined in, as indicated by the warning message that pops up in the top-right corner:

In another case, if you select one of these controls to move Equipment on a position which has another Equipment already placed, the two will simply swap positions (which is why this operation is called "swap" rather than "move"):

- >

Replace and Delete buttons

- Both the Replace and Delete Equipment buttons work completely the same as in the Rack Elevation dialog.

Remove to Design World

This button enables to simply move Equipment objects directly from the parent Equipment to the Design World. The placement of the object in the Design World doesn't change; when the Equipment is in the parent Equipment, it's x,y location is the same as that of the Rack, and after this removal operation that x,y remains the same. That means that the removed Equipment will be directly on top of or underneath the parent in the Design World and will need to found via the disambiguation menu.

Other properties of this operation:

the Lifecycle Stage of the Equipment doesn't change.
Cable connections to the Equipment are not broken, nor do Cables ends need to be updated - because the Equipment hasn't moved.
If you want to drag the Equipment to e.g. a nearby bench, you can do that as a separate step after this remove operation.
if the operation is done under a MAC, when it's done, a Remove Variety Of Change is generated

The following are other parts of the Equipment Elevation dialog, as listed below, most of which are same as in the Rack Elevation dialog:

Equipment panel

Connections panel

Statistics & Analysis panel

Equipment panel

Same as in the Rack Elevation dialog, the only difference is that the Rack Spaces in the drop-down are the ones defined per (in Equipment Type - Mount Point Arrangements tab):

Both the Replace and Delete Equipment buttons work completely the same as in the Rack Elevation dialog.

Connections panel

This panel looks and works the same way as in the Rack Elevation dialog:

Statistics & Analysis panel

Very similar to that in the Rack Elevation dialog, the only difference is in the Space Statistics accordion; the data is listed with one Rack Space per row: