I have spent all morning and most of the afternoon today trying to figure out how to work with the geodatabase tool. I need to record 3D information on a 2D plane, and I think this is the way to go about it, however I'm having difficulty. 

I am doing I.T. work on network closets at the institution I work at. Each closet has several racks. Each rack has several panels. Each panel has multiple fields of information I need to record; Cable Range, Color, Cable Type, Cable Destination, etc. I could create a shapefile for each panel and then tie that to an excel doc with all of the included data, but that would be tedious and take up a lot of memory space.

Ideally I would have a single point for each rack, which is then tied to data that contains information about the contents of each panel on that rack.

What's the best way to record all of this data?