Brocade Analytics Monitoring Platform simplifies application performance monitoring

Source: Brocade website. The Brocade Analytics Monitoring Platform.

Brocade today announced new capabilities in the Brocade Analytics Monitoring Platform, providing organisations with end-to-end visibility and greater insight into application performance. According to Brocade, customers can reduce nearly 70% of storage networking latency and performance-related problems with the enhanced platform.

According to Gartner*, “the reality is that data block size, read/write ratios, compression and deduplication ratios, virtual machine (VM) density on a server, etc. have a major impact on overall performance of storage devices, and these parameters vary from application to application. Architects need to evaluate these parameters and fine tune them so that they can optimise performance and meet service level agreements (SLAs), noting that this must be continually monitored for configuration drift. Investing in storage monitoring tools that help aggregate these metrics across the application environment is the first step in this direction.”

“The Brocade Analytics Monitoring Platform eliminates the need to implement multiple solutions at various endpoints and provides a more comprehensive view of the server, storage and network performance,” said Jack Rondoni, VP of storage networking, Brocade. “With the Brocade Analytics Monitoring Platform, organisations have complete visibility over their infrastructure allowing them to identify the true cause of any degradation and take action to meet application service level agreements (SLAs).”

The Brocade Analytics Monitoring Platform is a purpose-built storage area network (SAN) appliance that measures application- and device-level input and output (I/O) performance and analyses traffic behaviour within Brocade Gen 6 and Gen 5 Fibre Channel networks. The solution delivers actionable intelligence to administrators enabling them to optimise application performance. 

New features include:

Greater flexibility of monitoring and alerting with Flow Collections. This capability allows users to customise monitoring levels per device, application or other uniquely defined logical groups of data flows. 

Optimised user workflows in Brocade Network Advisor for the Analytics Monitoring Platform allow users to quickly identify problem behaviours and rapidly perform root cause analysis. A new Investigation Mode feature provides intuitive views.

A Flow Filtering feature allows users to pinpoint critical information of interest even in complex, virtualised environments.

A new database architecture in Brocade Network Advisor provides a highly responsive user experience and increased scalability for large environments.

The new version of the appliance also includes a redesigned dashboard interface, modern hardware design and more flexible custom reporting.

Organisations using the Brocade Analytics Monitoring Platform in either Brocade Gen 6 or Brocade Gen 5 Fibre Channel SAN will also be able to leverage VM Insight for unparalleled end-to-end visibility into the application performance of individual VMs. VM Insight uses standards-based VM tagging to enable the monitoring of VM-level application performance behaviour. Using this information, storage administrators can establish baseline application performance and identify anomalies. VM Insight also enables fast correlation with other Fabric Vision metrics to identify the root cause of problems before operations are affected.

Brocade currently plans to make VM Insight available as part of Fabric Vision technology and supported in the Brocade Analytics Monitoring Platform in 2017.

“As the lines between operational and business applications blur, it’s important to have the ability to deploy tools that allow IT organisations to be able to drill down and gain in-depth information on every aspect of the data centre,” said Lee Caswell, VP, Storage & Availability, VMware. 

 “VMware is excited to have our ecosystem provide solutions that will help customers, and with Brocade’s VM Insight, mutual customers now gain end-to-end visibility into the application performance of individual VMs. This is an ideal way to complement VMware’s visibility at the server and storage layer.”

Interested?

General availability of the Brocade Analytics Monitoring Platform is planned for Q416.

Watch the associated video: See Through the Complexity with Brocade Analytics Monitoring Platform

*Gartner, Storage Monitoring: Move From a Fragmented Visibility Toward an Integrated Approach, July 25, 2016