Provides End-to-End Visibility Across Application Environment to Optimise Performance
Brocade (NASDAQ: BRCD) today announced new capabilities in the Brocade® Analytics Monitoring Platform providing organisations with end-to-end visibility and greater insight into application performance. As a result, customers can reduce nearly 70 percent of storage networking latency and performance-related problems by quickly identifying changes in performance behaviours as well as pinpointing the root cause of issues before users are affected.
Organisations going through digital transformation are leveraging virtualisation, cloud technologies and automation to deploy applications faster than ever. Complexity in the data centre continues to rise along with performance expectations from users. Unfortunately, many organisations currently lack the tools and visibility required to see through that complexity and determine which devices are at fault for performance-related issues.
According to Gartner[1], “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 optimize 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, vice president 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 SLAs.”
New Brocade Analytics Platform Monitoring Features
The Brocade Analytics Monitoring Platform is a purpose-built SAN appliance that measures application- and device-level I/O performance and analyses traffic behavior within Brocade Gen 6 and Gen 5 Fibre Channel networks. The solution delivers actionable intelligence to administrators enabling them to optimize application performance. Utilising Brocade Fabric Vision™ technology, the Brocade Analytics Monitoring Platform is non-invasive and non-disruptive providing end-to-end performance data to dramatically reduce troubleshooting time.
New features in the Brocade Analytics Monitoring Platform 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. The ability to create logical groups of highly granular flow information simplifies troubleshooting, speeds up the planning process and provides simple yet flexible monitoring options for users.
- Optimized 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 to instantly drill into the details required for understanding complex behaviors and correlating events.
- A Flow Filtering capability allows users to pinpoint critical information of interest even in the most complex, virtualized environments with thousands of devices and tens of thousands of flows.
- Customisable reporting capabilities correlate metrics and events, summarise trends for behaviour analysis and demonstrate compliance with performance SLAs.
- A new database architecture in Brocade Network Advisor provides a highly responsive user experience and increased scalability for large environments.
- A new user-friendly dashboard interface and modern hardware design
"Since deploying the Brocade Analytics Monitoring Platform, we’ve had deeper visibility across the entire SAN environment,” said Jean Luc Aslan, data centre architect, Swisscom. “This has enabled us to better troubleshoot the issue and as a result, we reduced the time it takes to resolve problems from weeks to days.”
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. Brocade currently plans to make VM Insight available as part of Fabric Vision technology and supported in the Brocade Analytics Monitoring Platform sometime in 2017. 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 in order to fine-tune the infrastructure to meet service level objectives. VM Insight also enables fast correlation with other Fabric Vision metrics to identify the root cause of problems before operations are affected.
“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, vice president, 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.”
Availability
The new capabilities in the Brocade Analytics Monitoring Platform will be demonstrated for the first time at VMworld 2016 in Brocade Booth #935. General availability is planned for the fourth quarter of 2016. VM Insight will also be shown at VMworld 2016.
Additional Resources
- Blog: Enterprises Pursuit of Gold Without Data Insights
- Video: See Through the Complexity with Brocade Analytics Monitoring Platform
- Brocade Analytics Monitoring Platform Data Sheet
About Brocade
Brocade (NASDAQ: BRCD) networking solutions help the world’s leading organizations turn their networks into platforms for business innovation. With solutions spanning public and private data centres to the network edge, Brocade is leading the industry in its transition to the New IP network infrastructures required for today’s era of digital business. (www.brocade.com)
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© 2016 Brocade Communications Systems, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
These products and features and their availability are subject to change at the sole discretion of Brocade, and Brocade shall have no liability for delay in the delivery or failure to deliver any of the products or features described herein.
Brocade, Brocade Assurance, the B-wing symbol, ClearLink, DCX, Fabric OS, HyperEdge, ICX, MLX, MyBrocade, OpenScript, VCS, VDX, Vplane, and Vyatta are registered trademarks, and Fabric Vision is a trademark of Brocade Communications Systems, Inc., in the United States and/or in other countries. Other brands, products, or service names mentioned may be trademarks of others.
[1] Gartner, “Storage Monitoring: Move From a Fragmented Visibility Toward an Integrated Approach,” July 25, 2016