Brocade unveils advanced SAN management solution

fabric-based data center networking solutions, Brocade announced the availability of new Brocade Fabric Vision technology capabilities, delivering the industry's most advanced storage area network (SAN) management solution. The new features, Monitoring and Alerting Policy Suite (MAPS) and Flow Vision, provide breakthrough capabilities that dramatically simplify SAN administration and reduce operational costs, while further improving the availability and performance of Brocade Fibre Channel SANs.

Unique to the Brocade Fibre Channel SAN family, Fabric Vision technology is a hardware and software solution that helps IT organizations accelerate new SAN deployments, optimize resources and dramatically reduce operational costs. With Fabric Vision 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 the highest levels of availability and performance.

"Fibre Channel 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, Brocade. "The innovative Fabric Vision technology capabilities that are available today continue to advance the core values of Fibre Channel, and are a strong proof point of Brocade's continued leadership in data center SANs," he added.

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.

Organizations can further reduce operational costs by configuring MAPS policies across an entire fabric or multiple fabrics. In addition, MAPS 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 easily identify trends and other behaviors occurring in a switch or fabric.

Flow Vision is a comprehensive, 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.

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 dramatically simplifying SAN administration and reducing operational costs.

Brocade Fabric Vision technology, including MAPS and Flow Vision, is available now 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.