Brocade Delivers New SAN Management Solution

Brocade Communications Systems, Inc. announced the availability of new Brocade Fabric Vision technology capabilities, delivering advanced SAN management solution.

The new features, Monitoring and Alerting Policy Suite and Flow Vision, provide capabilities that simplify SAN administration and reduce operational costs, while improving the availability and performance of Brocade FC SANs.

Unique to the Brocade FC SAN family, Fabric Vision technology is a hardware and software solution that helps IT organizations accelerate new SAN deployments, optimize resources and reduce operational costs. With this technology, administrators have new tools and automation that simplify day-to-day SAN management tasks, increase productivity and enable proactive management of SAN infrastructures to help ensure high level of availability and performance.

“FC continues to be the data center technology of choice to support the growing demands of highly virtualized environments, cloud architectures and new flash-based storage because it delivers the highest levels of reliability, scalability and network performance,” said Jack Rondoni, VP, data center storage and solutions, at Brocade. “The innovative Fabric Vision technology capabilities that are available today continue to advance the core values of FC, and are a strong proof point of Brocade’s continued leadership in data center SANs.”

Proactive Visibility
into SAN Health and Performance with MAPS
MAPS is a policy-based monitoring and alerting solution that proactively monitors the health and performance of the SAN infrastructure to help ensure application uptime and availability. Leveraging built-in policies that contain hundreds of threshold-based rules and actions that have been vetted by Brocade SAN experts, MAPS eliminates the complexity, guesswork and manual effort of defining and deploying a proactive monitoring and alerting solution.

Organizations can further reduce operational costs by configuring MAPS policies across an entire fabric or multiple fabrics. In addition, it allows for customizing rules for specific ports across fabrics at one time using a single dialog box. An integrated dashboard displays a health report for each switch, along with details on out-of-policy conditions, to help administrators quickly pinpoint potential issues and identify trends and other behaviors occurring in a switch or fabric.

SAN Performance with Flow Vision
Flow Vision is a built-in tool that allows administrators to non-disruptively identify, monitor and analyze specific application and data flows in order to maximize performance, optimize resources and avoid congestion. Providing visibility and insight into flows across the fabric, it is superior to expensive third-party tools that are typically disruptive to applications and that can degrade optical signal strengths.

Flow Vision provides broad visibility into flows in the fabric, and offers the ability to automatically detect flows, non-disruptively monitor flow performance, and obtain statistics associated with specific flows to ensure maximum application performance and resource optimization. When used in conjunction with MAPS and Brocade Network Advisor, Flow Vision enables proactive application management.

Together, MAPS, Flow Vision and Brocade Network Advisor provide a fabric-wide, threshold-based monitoring and alerting solution that enables proactive management to improve availability while simplifying SAN administration and reducing operational costs.

Fabric Vision technology, including MAPS and Flow Vision, is available as an optional license through select Brocade OEM and channel partners, including HP. Fabric Vision technology will be available from other Brocade OEM partners later this year.