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Analytics services that used to be exclusively for high-performance computing are finding their way into new-gen use cases that include connected cars, connected homes, website monitoring and data center management—pretty much the gamut of enterprise and personal IT.
As a result of listening to their customers, IT vendors of all kinds are now finding ways to add, as either native or optional features, these capabilities into their products. This trend may continue indefinitely.
Storage networking provider Brocade, running alongside this trend, on Aug. 23 unveiled its new Analytics Monitoring Platform to provide enterprises with end-to-end (servers to storage) visibility and insight into application performance.
As a result, the company claims, users can reduce up to 70 percent of storage networking latency and performance-related problems by identifying changes in performance behaviors as well as pinpointing the root cause of issues before users are affected.
Appliance Plugs Into Fibre Channel Networks
The Brocade Analytics Monitoring Platform is a physical storage-area network appliance that plugs into a Fibre Channel network to obtain deep insight into the performance of both the network and the applications running in it, Senior Director of Product Marketing Scott Shimomura told eWEEK. Specifically, it measures application- and device-level I/O performance and analyzes traffic behavior within Brocade Gen 6 and Gen 5 Fibre Channel networks.
Key features include the following.
–Greater flexibility of monitoring and alerting with Flow Collections. This capability enables users to customize monitoring levels per device or 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 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 service-level agreements (SLAs).
–A new database architecture in Brocade Network Advisor provides a highly responsive user experience and increased scalability for large environments.
VM Insight, which will be available as part of Fabric Vision technology and supported in the Brocade Analytics Monitoring Platform in 2017, will enable users to optimize VM performance and availability in a virtualized data center, Shimomura said. VM Insight uses standards-based VM tagging to enable the monitoring of VM-level application performance behavior.
Available in Q4 2016
The new capabilities in the Brocade Analytics Monitoring Platform will be demonstrated for the first time Aug. 29-31 at VMworld 2016 at Brocade Booth #935. General availability is planned for the fourth quarter of 2016. VM Insight will also be demonstrated at VMworld 2016.