Fabric networking solutions specialist, Brocade, has joined forces with virtualisation firm VMware to provide what is described as intelligent and powerful analytics for Fibre Channel Storage Area Networks (SANs).
This will support cloud environments using VMware vCenter Log Insight 2.0, which has also been announced today.
VMware vCenter Log Insight aims to offer real-time insights and monitoring of data from applications, virtualised infrastructure and physical hardware to help improve operational efficiency through automation and simplify IT troubleshooting. The companies say it delivers the performance and scalability required by IT organisations for visualising and analysing multi-terabyte datasets.
The new Brocade SAN Content Pack adds important functionality for Brocade environments in VMware vCenter Log Insight 2.0. It uses Brocade Fabric Vision technology to enhance the innovative machine-learning functionality and improved query and data collection capabilities to provide systems administrators with a complete view of SAN health and behaviour across physical, virtual and hybrid cloud environments.
Jack Rondoni, VP, Data Centre Storage and Solutions, Brocade, said: "Because IT infrastructures generate massive numbers of alerts on a daily basis, understanding which ones are truly meaningful is typically a manual, painstaking, and time-consuming process that can create inefficiencies.
"Administrators can use tools like Brocade SAN Content Pack and VMware vCenter Log Insight 2.0 to effectively manage the shifting infrastructure patterns typical of modern data centres. This enables IT to fine-tune their environment via more effective root-cause analysis and visibility, enabling more efficient IT operations."
Brocade Fabric Vision technology with VMware vCenter Log Insight is said to enable a significant improvement over prior generations of analytics solutions that have attempted to use complicated heuristics and rigid algorithms to improve the signal-to-noise ratio for dealing with vast oceans of log data. This could provide deeper knowledge of SAN behaviour to increase visibility about a variety of issues impacting VM performance and application responsiveness.
The Brocade SAN Content Pack is designed to automatically deliver data to Log Insight to quickly present the most relevant log data within the context of VMware Log Insight Manager. This approach could reduce the overall mean-time to problem identification. Users are offered predefined dashboards, queries, alerts, and fields that can also be customised to specific environments. SAN events are intelligently classified and filtered to weed out volumes of excess or less-meaningful data that can inhibit quick responsiveness in maintaining SAN fabric uptime.
