EMC and Brocade Management Tools Integrated

Brocade Communications Systems, Inc. has partnered with EMC Corp. to simplify and automate the management of joint EMC and Brocade SAN environments.

This integration provides organizations with a more holistic view of their storage networking resources to improve alert monitoring and enhance correlation in order to expedite issue resolution within virtualized and cloud environments.

To increase operational simplicity and automation, Brocade Network Advisor SAN management software, sold through EMC as Connectrix Manager Converged Network Edition (CMCNE), is integrated with the new EMC ProSphere 1.6 cloud storage management software. As a result, storage administrators can now navigate from ProSphere to CMCNE to evaluate alerts, analyze performance or make changes to their SAN switch infrastructure – all from one click on a single screen.

Demonstrations of the joint solution, which represents the first integration of a SAN management tool with EMC ProSphere, were shown at EMC World.

In addition to offering convenience and time savings, the ProSphere/CMCNE integration allows administrators to easily combine storage and SAN management functions to help ensure consistent, timely and cost-effective access to.

EMC introduced extensions to the VMAX family along with the latest release of ProSphere. Along with CMCNE integration, ProSphere v1.6 includes new reporting capabilities to support the latest enhancements to the VMAX family and integration with the newly announced Unisphere for VMAX.

"EMC and Brocade are working together to help make SAN management infinitely easier for the storage administrator," said Johan Marais, storage and virtualization administrator at Discovery Holdings, a financial services institution founded on the principles of consumer engagement and wellness. "With this new solution, storage administrators will be able to quickly identify SAN issues, triage the issue and, if necessary, launch into CMCNE for deeper analysis or reconfiguration of the Brocade switches. The partnership between EMC and Brocade enables us to better leverage these two best-of-breed tools to monitor, analyze and optimize our storage infrastructure for increased agility."

When paired with CMCNE, ProSphere enables IT transformation in both physical and virtual environments, allowing organizations to manage IT-as-a-Service by monitoring and analyzing service levels from end to end. It enables organizations to visualize relationships and application dependencies across physical and virtual environments, analyze storage services to improve services levels and optimize the storage infrastructure. CMCNE provides visibility and management of the entire network infrastructure to monitor, diagnose and improve performance to enable better coordination between storage and data networking for provisioning, troubleshooting and reporting.

"We are now providing a more intuitive experience for EMC customers when they are operating and managing their storage environment to enhance service levels and improve the utilization of their storage investments," said Jay Mastaj, SVP and GM of the Infrastructure Management Group at EMC. "In addition to strengthening our relationship with Brocade, this integration advances our strategy for establishing ProSphere as the industry’s premier storage resource management platform."

CMCNE is an unified network management solution for data, storage and converged networks. It supports FC SANs, including 16Gbps platforms, FCoE networks, Layer 2/3 IP networks (including those running Brocade VCS Fabric technology), wireless LANs, application delivery networks and multiprotocol label switching (MPLS) networks in service provider environments. It provides management of data center SAN fabrics, including configuration, monitoring, diagnostics and best-practices validation as well as management of Brocade backbones, switches, HBAs, CNAs and the Brocade 1860 Fabric Adapter.

EMC ProSphere storage resource management software is designed to meet the needs of growing virtualized data centers. It enables organizations to understand how capacity is being used, track consumption trends to improve capacity planning and receive automated alerts across the storage environment to identify issues and quickly assess their impact in just two clicks. It also includes capacity dashboards and reporting capabilities that feature enhanced integration with EMC FAST VP (Fully Automated Storage Tiering for Virtual Pools).

EMC ProSphere 1.6 and CMCNE are available from EMC and its global network of channel partners.