Brocade Collaborates With VMware

Brocade Communications Systems, Inc. has collaborated with VMware, Inc. to provide analytics capabilities for FC SANs supporting cloud environments using VMware vCenter Log Insight 2.0, which was also announced.

vCenter Log Insight can deliver real-time insights and monitoring of data from applications, virtualized infrastructure and physical hardware to help improve operational efficiency through automation and simplify IT troubleshooting. vCenter Log Insight delivers the performance and scalability required by IT organizations for visualizing and analyzing multi-TBs datasets.

The new Brocade SAN Content Pack adds important functionality for Brocade environments in vCenter Log Insight 2.0. It uses Brocade Fabric Vision technology to enhance the machine-learning functionality and improved query and data collection capabilities to provide systems administrators with a complete view of SAN health and behavior across physical, virtual and hybrid cloud environments.

“Because IT infrastructures generate massive numbers of alerts on a daily basis, understanding which ones are truly meaningful is typically a manual, painstaking, and time-consuming process that can create inefficiencies,” said Jack Rondoni, VP, data center storage and solutions, Brocade. “Administrators can use tools like Brocade SAN Content Pack and VMware vCenter Log Insight 2.0 to effectively manage the shifting infrastructure patterns typical of modern data centers. This enables IT to fine-tune their environment via more effective root-cause analysis and visibility, enabling more efficient IT operations.“

Brocade Fabric Vision technology with vCenter Log insight enables an improvement over prior generations of analytics solutions that have attempted to use complicated heuristics and rigid algorithms to improve the signal-to-noise ratio for dealing with vast oceans of log data. This provides deeper knowledge of SAN behavior to increase visibility about a variety of issues impacting VM performance and application responsiveness.

The SAN Content Pack can deliver data to Log Insight to present the most relevant log data within the context of VMware Log Insight Manager. This approach can reduce the overall mean-time to problem identification. Users are offered predefined dashboards, queries, alerts, and fields that can also be customized to specific environments. SAN events are classified and filtered to weed out volumes of excess or less-meaningful data that can inhibit quick responsiveness in maintaining SAN fabric uptime.

“Brocade’s achievements in simplifying and automating SAN fabrics align with VMware’s design goals for VMware vCenter Log Insight 2.0,” said Sajai Krishnan, VP, product marketing, cloud management business unit, VMware. “This builds on a number of areas of collaboration between Brocade and VMware, further demonstrating the value we are jointly delivering to the most advanced data centers.“

The SAN Content Pack is available at no charge and can be downloaded from the Log Insight Marketplace on the VMware Solution Exchange.