Brocade and VMware in SAN collaboration

• To develop SAN Analytics Management Pack for VMware vCenter Operations Management Suite
• Will lower operational costs and increase application availability, Brocade claims

FABRIC networking solutions provider Brocade said it has collaborated with VMware to develop a new management pack that enables enterprises to proactively manage Fibre Channel storage area networks (SANs) operating within highly virtualised environments.
 
This would help lower operational costs and increase application availability, the company said in a statement.
 
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.
 
“Today, IT staff have limited visibility into the Fibre Channel SAN from VMware management tools, leading to more time spent troubleshooting issues and increased downtime, degraded application performance, and underutilised resources,” said Jack Rondoni, vice president of data centre 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,” Rondoni claimed.
 
The integration uses the behavioural learning functionality in the 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, Brocade claimed.
 
“SAN fabrics are a critical part of the IT infrastructure and, therefore, must be actively monitored,” research and consultancy firm Gartner said in its Recommendations for SAN Fabric Dashboards report in 2011.
 
“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 said.
 
Brocade Fabric Vision technology serves as the foundation to the Brocade SAN Analytics integration into vCenter Operations Management Suite. Brocade Fabric Vision technology delivers innovative diagnostic, monitoring, and management capabilities to maximize network uptime, simplify SAN management, and provide unprecedented visibility and insight across the storage network.
 
Related Stories:
 
Brocade introduces its Fabric Vision Technology
 
Brocade and EMC deliver software-defined storage for fibre channel SANs
 
VMware touts next generation software-defined data centers
 
 
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