Achieving greater ROI for mission-critical applications

Monitoring and analysing IT infrastructure performance has been a complex, time-consuming task that requires complete end-to-end network knowledge to optimise application performance. Typically, IT staff have had two alternatives: manual methods that use 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 that is superior to these traditional alternatives.

Today, many enterprises rely on guesswork and the accrued experience of IT staff to maintain application Service Level Agreements (SLAs), and to identify and resolve issues across their compute, network, and storage resources. As requirements for 100 percent network availability continue to grow, a lack of complete visibility into the IT infrastructure can cause excessive and unnecessary application performance impact and downtime events as IT staff struggle to quickly identify and resolve bottlenecks, configuration mistakes, and other conditions that prevent predictable performance for network-connected servers and storage.

Moreover, because existing monitoring and analytics solutions are very expensive, IT organisations often exclude the monitoring of server-attached ports, and even some storage-attached ports due to budget constraints—making it impossible to get direct visibility into the behaviour of all devices and preventing true, end-to-end monitoring of traffic flows. This limited visibility also eliminates direct monitoring of fabric latency between the servers and the storage.

The Brocade Analytics Monitoring Platform is designed to help enterprises transform their environments to mitigate these risks. It is a dedicated, purpose-built 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 the performance of all applications.

With the ability to analyse an unprecedented 20,000 data flows and millions of 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 the often-subtle causes of infrastructure issues that diminish performance and availability. Performance history and trends are also tracked, enabling IT staff to proactively monitor and resolve issues, often before they occur.

“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 Jack Rondoni, vice president of storage networking 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 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.”