Brocade Collaborating With VMware …

Brocade Communications Systems, Inc. has collaborated with VMware, Inc. to develop a new management pack that enables enterprises to proactively manage FC SANs operating within highly virtualized environments to lower operational costs and increase application availability.

Specifically, Brocade has collaborated with VMware to develop the Brocade SAN Analytics Management Pack for the VMware vCenter Operations Management Suite, which automatically sends real-time SAN health and performance metrics information from Brocade SAN fabrics into vCenter Operations Management Suite.

The integration leverages the behavioral learning functionality in vCenter Operations Management Suite to provide useful baseline metrics and trending information for data traffic, as well as identifying SAN bottlenecks between servers and storage to enable more proactive application performance monitoring. This further simplifies SAN operations management and lowers operational costs by reducing the time to troubleshoot issues – thereby resulting in faster recovery and increased availability of VM-resident applications.

According to Gartner, "SAN fabrics are a critical part of the IT infrastructure and, therefore, must be actively monitored. As servers are consolidated using hypervisors in virtual server environments, greater demands are placed on the storage infrastructure, because each physical server contains more applications and uses more SAN fabric resources. As a result, the loss of a storage connection to a single physical server that hosts many virtual hosts has a greater service impact." (Gartner, Recommendations for SAN Fabric Dashboards, Valdis Filks and Robert E. Passmore, June 2, 2011, ID: 00213188, pg. 2)

"Today IT staff have limited visibility into the FC SAN from VMware management tools, leading to more time spent troubleshooting issues and increased downtime, degraded application performance, and underutilized resources," said Jack Rondoni, VP, data center storage and solutions, at Brocade. "With the Brocade SAN Analytics integration with vCenter Operations Management Suite, administrators will have an aggregated view across the entire virtual infrastructure within vCenter Operations Management Suite, including SAN and storage, enabling them to quickly isolate problems and focus troubleshooting efforts on the right location. As a result, time-to-resolution of issues is reduced from days and hours, to minutes."

At VMworld, the company demonstrated the SAN Analytics Management Pack for vCenter Operations Management Suite at the Moscone Convention Center. In addition, the company presented and discussed this SAN functionality at a session titled Health, Risk and Efficiency Assessment of SAN Infrastructure with vCenter Operations Manager.

Fabric Vision technology serves as the foundation to the Brocade SAN Analytics integration into vCenter Operations Management Suite. It delivers diagnostic, monitoring, and management capabilities to maximize network uptime, simplify SAN management, and provide visibility and insight across the storage network.

As the enabling technology for the SAN Analytics Management Pack, Fabric Vision features utilized for vCenter Operations Management Suite analytics are:

• Easy to use, policy-based threshold monitoring and alerting suite that proactively monitors the health and performance of the SAN infrastructure to help ensure application uptime and availability.
• Automated network traffic congestion detection in the fabric and correlation with hosts and applications impacted by a bottlenecked SAN port.

"Storage plays an important role in highly virtualized data centers," said Ramin Sayar, SVP and GM, cloud management, VMware. "With the Brocade SAN Analytics Management Pack for VMware vCenter Operations Management Suite, customers can benefit from visibility that extends into the storage subsystem, simplified management and rapid root cause detection, as well as optimal performance of workloads running in their virtual environments."

vCenter Operations Management Suite applies patented analytics to integrated performance, capacity and configuration management for cloud infrastructure to deliver QoS, operational efficiency and continuous compliance for dynamic hybrid cloud infrastructure and business critical applications.