Broadcom updates FibreChannel with SAN management; increases operational efficiencies, delivers actionable information, simplified processes

Broadcom announced new SAN management platforms, Brocade SANnav Management Portal and Brocade SANnav Global View that delivers a dynamic, comprehensive, and faster SAN management experience.

In addition, Broadcom announced a new replication connectivity solution, the Brocade 7810 Extension Switch that moves more data faster over distance to meet demanding disaster recovery requirements.

Enterprises are faced with large amounts of operational data points and increased infrastructure complexity that can be overwhelming to manage. In fact, according to ESG’s research, 68 percent of IT decision makers say that IT is more complex than it was just two years ago.

To address this complexity, Brocade SANnav Management Portal and SANnav Global View provides visibility across multiple SAN fabrics, transforms SAN behavior and performance data into actionable insights, and reduces administrative tasks through automation. This enables administrators to associate real-time data with historical metrics and logs for in-depth analysis to spot trends, establish baselines, and identify any behavioral changes over time.

These advanced capabilities accelerate administrative tasks by simplifying workflows and automating redundant steps, making it easier for organizations to realize their goal of an autonomous SAN.

SANnav Management Portal captures SAN telemetry data and contextualizes this data into visual dashboards, enabling administrators to quickly detect and isolate points of interest for both troubleshooting and performance optimization.

For large organizations with multiple SANs within a data center or spread across the globe, Brocade SANnav Global View allows administrators to understand the health of their SAN resources, and navigate from a holistic view down to the individual fabrics and switches in a specific local environment.

Brocade SANnav Management Portal is a next-generation SAN management application, architected from the ground up with a simple browser-based user interface (UI) and with a focus on streamlining common workflows, such as configuration, zoning, deployment, troubleshooting, and reporting. It also increases operational efficiencies with a modernized graphical user interface (GUI) that enables enhanced monitoring capabilities, faster troubleshooting, and advanced analytics.

With Brocade SANnav Global View, administrators can visualize the health, performance, and inventory of multiple SANnav Management Portal instances using a simple, intelligent dashboard. In addition, they can easily navigate from a global view down to local environments to investigate points of interest. Important events across all local environments are propagated at a global level for instant visibility in the alerts box.

Using the search capabilities within SANnav Global View, administrators can then seamlessly navigate across instances and drill down into any individual SANnav Management Portal instance for additional details.

Brocade Gen 6 Fibre Channel hardware includes integrated network sensors that non-disruptively gather millions of real-time metrics that SANnav Management Portal uses to identify, monitor, and analyze the overall health and performance of the SAN. This data is then contextualized into dashboards that can be used to quickly detect and isolate problems.

At a glance, administrators have actionable intelligence on the overall health of their fabric, switches, servers, and storage, which they can view in the form of summary health score circles. The summary health score circles help administrators identify areas that require further investigation. Administrators can drill down from each dashboard into investigation mode to further examine any relevant data for performance optimization or troubleshooting.