Brocade Analytics Monitoring Platform for FC SAN

Brocade Communication Systems, Inc. announced innovation in its FC SAN solutions with the introduction of the Analytics Monitoring Platform.

Representing a new product line for the company, the Analytics Monitoring Platform allows organizations to achieve ROI and reduced OpEx for their mission-critical applications by providing IT staff with the hight level of monitoring and analytics between servers and storage. As a result, organizations can better ensure predictable performance and operational stability for their IT infrastructures.

Monitoring and analyzing IT infrastructure performance has been a complex, time-consuming task that requires complete end-to-end network knowledge to optimize application performance. Typically, IT staff have had two alternatives – manual methods that use Excel spreadsheets, or expensive automated tools that add complexity, expose the network to security risks, and require application and network outages during the installation, configuration, and tuning process. The new company solution represents a simpler design and deployment architecture that is superior to these traditional alternatives.

Today, many enterprises rely on guesswork and the accrued experience of IT staff to maintain application SLAs, and to identify and resolve issues across their compute, network, and storage resources. As requirements for 100% network availability continue to grow, a lack of complete visibility into the IT infrastructure can cause excessive and unnecessary application performance impact and downtime events as IT staff struggle to quickly identify and resolve bottlenecks, configuration mistakes, and other conditions that prevent predictable performance for network-connected servers and storage.

Moreover, because existing monitoring and analytics solutions are very expensive, IT organizations often exclude the monitoring of server-attached ports, and even some storage-attached ports due to budget constraints — making it impossible to get direct visibility into the behavior of all devices and preventing true, end-to-end monitoring of traffic flows, This limited visibility also eliminates direct monitoring of fabric latency between the servers and the storage.

The Analytics Monitoring Platform is designed to help enterprises transform their environments to mitigate these risks. It is a dedicated, purpose-built storage network appliance for measuring application – and device-level I/O performance and traffic behaviors without compromising security or placing additional strain on compute, storage, or network resources. The appliance analyzes traffic for all network-connected devices, including data flows between both servers and storage devices, to provide end-to-end visibility into the performance of all applications.

With the ability to analyze 20,000 data flows and millions of IO/s on a single system, the  Analytics Monitoring Platform calculates and analyzes vast amounts of metrics from across the network, including network-connected devices, to uncover the often-subtle causes of infrastructure issues that diminish performance and availability. Performance history and trends are also tracked, enabling IT staff to proactively monitor and resolve issues, often before they occur.

“To meet the demand of application and data growth, enterprises are deploying virtualized and cloud environments with the tradeoffs of increased costs, complexity, and potential downtime,” said Jack Rondoni, VP, storage networking, Brocade. “The Brocade Analytics Monitoring Platform not only provides end-to-end visibility that was not available previously, but it also improves the ROI for storage infrastructures by providing in-depth, fabric-wide metrics.“

“The ability to most efficiently optimize a SAN environment requires end-to-end visibility into performance statistics associated with all attached network devices,” said Eric Burgener, research director, storage, IDC. “Brocade’s Analytics Monitoring Platform offers that in a centralized management platform that provides a comprehensive view of what is happening across the entire fabric, with the additional benefits of simple, rapid and non-intrusive deployment based on ‘virtual tap’ technology that is pre-integrated into all Brocade Gen 5 hardware. Solutions like this will enable enterprises to get more out of their existing SANs, more reliably meet service level objectives, better maintain operational stability, and more accurately plan expansions.“

The Analytics Monitoring Platform design is unique in directly connecting into a single port on a Gen 5 FC director or switch to non-invasively collect select information from storage and host ports. The appliance is then able to calculate detailed I/O performance metrics about the server and storage data flows using dual, onboard data processors. Not only is the appliance able to calculate latency for all connected devices within the SAN fabric, but it can also directly measure fabric latency, the time it takes for data to traverse the network itself. The design simplicity also creates an ROI advantage by allowing a single appliance to massively scale out to accommodate very large SAN environments without creating additional costs.

With this architecture, the Analytics Monitoring Platform can be installed and configured in minutes, without requiring any network downtime because of its direct utilization of Gen 5 hardware and Fabric Vision technology.

To support proactive management of the network infrastructure, the Analytics Monitoring Platform helps organizations establish baselines, identify trends, and deliver information about behavioral threshold settings. When used with Network Advisor management software, the appliance can generate reports to show both granular and summary data, so that storage teams can demonstrate compliance with application performance SLAs. Company’s Network Advisor allows organizations to ‘play back’ historic information collected from,e analytics platform, an invaluable tool in investigating performance issues or learning more about behavioral trends and patterns in order to optimize device and application performance.

In addition, the Analytics Monitoring Platform complements the features and functionality of the SAN Content Pack for vRealize to improve overall IT infrastructure visibility within highly virtualized VMware environments. The SAN Content Pack for vRealize Log Insight eliminates ‘noise’ from millions of events nd amplifies critical SAN alerts to acelerate troubleshooting with actionable analytics.

End-to-end professional services are included with every Analytics Monitoring Platform for tasks such as initial setup and configuration, tuning, reporting, and network optimization. Additional professional services will be optionally available, including ongoing tuning and optimization services, analysis of the appliance’s configuration data, fine tuning of all settings, and SAN infrastructure analysis.

The Analytics Monitoring Platform is available directly from the company.

“Ease of deployment with no requirement to take a network outage to install is what impressed us the most about the Brocade Analytics Monitoring Platform. We are working to deploy our first systems later this year and look forward to having a deeper visibility across our entire IT infrastructure to monitor IO-Latency in our storage environment to ensure SLA copliance to our customers.”said Markus Schriber, global head, storage, Commerzbank AG.

“The Brocade Analytics Monitoring Platform will enable our joint customers to achieve greater OpEx savings by eliminating the learning curve and downtime associated with managing fabric-wide data flows and delivering more predictable performance between servers and storage systems. Together, Brocade and Hitachi IT infrastructure solutions and advanced analytics capabilities simplify cloud and big data infrastructures so users can focus their energy on larger business challenges.” said Linda Xu, VP, WW product marketing, Hitachi Data Systems Corpration.