Brocade collaborates with VMware to improve SAN management

SAN FRANCISCO, USA: Brocade, fabric networking solution provider, today announced the company 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 virtualized environments to lower operational costs and increase application availability.

Specifically, 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.

The integration leverages the unique behavioral learning functionality in 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.

According to Gartner, "SAN fabrics are a critical part of the IT infrastructure and, therefore, must be actively monitored. 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."

"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 underutilized resources," said Jack Rondoni, vice president, data center 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," added Rondoni.

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.

"Storage plays an important role in highly virtualized data centers," said Ramin Sayar, senior vice president and general manager, Cloud Management, VMware.

"With the Brocade SAN Analytics Management Pack for VMware vCenter Operations Management Suite, customers can benefit from visibility that extends into the storage subsystem, simplified management and rapid root cause detection, as well as optimal performance of workloads running in their virtual environments," added Sayar.