Brocade Analytics Monitoring Platform delivers unprecedented insight into Storage Networks

Brocade recently announced new capabilities in the Brocade Analytics Monitoring Platform providing organizations 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 behaviors as well as pinpointing the root cause of issues before users are affected.

Organizations going through digital transformation are leveraging virtualization, cloud technologies and automation to deploy applications faster than ever.  Complexity in the data center continues to rise along with performance expectations from users.  Unfortunately, many organizations 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, “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, organizations 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 analyzes 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.  Utilizing 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 customize 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 behaviors 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.
• Customizable reporting capabilities correlate metrics and events, summarize trends for behavior 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 center 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.”

Organizations 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 behavior.  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 organizations to be able to drill down and gain in-depth information on every aspect of the data center,” 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.