Traditionally, IT staff have had two alternatives - manual tracking with 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 Brocade solution represents a much simpler design and deployment architecture.
The Brocade Analytics Monitoring Platform is a dedicated storage network appliance for measuring application- and device-level I/O performance and traffic behaviours without compromising security or placing additional strain on compute, storage, or network resources. The appliance analyses traffic for all network-connected devices, including data flows between both servers and storage devices, to provide end-to-end visibility into performance.
With the ability to analyse 20,000 data flows and millions of input/output operations per second (IOPS) on a single system, the Brocade Analytics Monitoring Platform calculates and analyses vast amounts of metrics from across the network, including network-connected devices, to uncover issues that diminish performance and availability. Performance history and trends are also tracked, enabling IT staff to proactively monitor and resolve issues.
"To meet the demand of application and data growth, enterprises are deploying virtualised and cloud environments with the tradeoffs of increased costs, complexity, and potential downtime," said CK Lam, Director, Data Center Fabric and Virtualization for Asia Pacific at 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 optimise a storage area network (SAN) environment requires end-to-end visibility into performance statistics associated with all attached network devices," said Eric Burgener, Research Director, storage at IDC.
"The ability to most efficiently optimise a storage area network (SAN) environment requires end-to-end visibility into performance statistics associated with all attached network devices," said Eric Burgener, Research Director, storage at IDC.
"Brocade's Analytics Monitoring Platform offers that in a centralised 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 Brocade Analytics Monitoring Platform directly connects into a single port on a Brocade Gen 5 Fibre Channel director or switch to collect select information non-invasively 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.
The Brocade Analytics Monitoring Platform directly connects into a single port on a Brocade Gen 5 Fibre Channel director or switch to collect select information non-invasively 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.
When used with Brocade 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. Brocade Network Advisor also allows organisations to "play back" historic information collected from the analytics platform, an invaluable tool in investigating performance issues or learning more about behavioural trends and patterns in order to optimise device and application performance.
End-to-end professional services are included with every Brocade Analytics Monitoring Platform for tasks such as initial setup and configuration, tuning, reporting, and network optimisation. Additional service options include ongoing tuning and optimisation services, analysis of the appliance's configuration data, fine tuning of all settings, and SAN infrastructure analysis.
"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 compliance to our customers," said Markus Schreiber, Global Head of Storage, Commerzbank. Commerzbank is present in 50 countries worldwide, and has a presence in Asia Pacific and the Middle East.
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