Technologies for connecting data cables in a data center are disclosed. In the illustrative embodiment, racks of the data center are grouped into different zones based on the distance from the racks in a given zone to a network switch. All of the racks in a given zone are connected to the network switch using data cables of the same length. In some embodiments, certain physical resources such as storage may be placed in racks that are in zones closer to the network switch and therefore use shorter data cables with lower latency. An orchestrator server may, in some embodiments, schedule workloads or create virtual servers based on the different zones and corresponding latency of different physical resources.