Hello Rick,
Does that sound more correct?
I talked to someone else in the office here, and they believe that they've seen it done with a switch in each cabinet, although they couldn't remember is there was a patch panel as well. If you're running 802.1q trunks between a bunch of switches (no patch-panels needed), I can see that working too, I suppose.
Thats the best solution I think. Less cables, less work for precabling. Build 1gige or 2x1gige fiber uplinks. Perhaps wheels on the racks (then you can play google). You have check what switches you use in the racks and in the core. Number of vlans supported is the main goal. Perhaps some hp procurve in the racks and some real coreswitches in the backbone. When you reach 4096 vlans you could use vlan in vlan or mpls to grow more. Kind regards, Ingo Flaschberger