Integrated Fabric Management

As IT organizations consolidate, evolve, and operate more as service providers to their customers, they must deploy Service-Oriented Infrastructures (SOI) and management processes. Combined with the expansion of data center virtualization, this trend has increased pressure to provide greater levels of service while reducing costs. Meeting this challenge in complex, growing environments requires a management solution that is easy to use and that helps automate management operations.

Brocade Network Advisor is the industry’s first unified network management solution, providing end-to-end visibility across different network types through a seamless and unified user experience. It is designed to simplify and automate network operations by unifying network management of SAN, IP (including Ethernet fabric), and wireless environments. As a result, IT organizations have a single management framework for their entire network infrastructure, with intelligently designed interfaces and full Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) to support the needs of different network teams.

Organizations can use Brocade Network Advisor to manage their storage and data networks separately, or through a single instance of the product. This enables better coordination between storage and data networking administrators for provisioning, troubleshooting, and reporting. Similarly, organizations can manage wired and wireless enterprise campus networks within a single management application—propagating security and access policies across the entire enterprise and quarantining any malicious activity immediately.

To provide a comprehensive solution, Brocade Network Advisor integrates seamlessly with industry-leading hypervisors and management offerings from Microsoft, VMware, EMC, HP, and IBM—maximizing the value of IT investments.

Brocade Data Center Fabric Manager (DCFM) is a comprehensive network management solution that unifies management of data center environments. Managing and securing the flow of data across multiple fabrics empowers organizations to achieve their goals related to Service Level Agreements (SLAs), security, and compliance while containing or even reducing their operating expenses.

To account for the enormous growth in data moving within and across data centers, today’s management solutions must provide unprecedented scalability and performance to make data available to users immediately and at any time. Administration tools that streamline or automate repetitive tasks must also be intuitive and easy-to-use.

Brocade DCFM provides these capabilities and integrates with leading third-party data center automation solutions through frameworks such as the Storage Management Initiative-Specification (SMI-S). Brocade DCFM provides the following key capabilities:

• Superior scalability and performance
• Unified data center fabric management to extend the scope of management from individual switches and directors to pools of physical and virtualized servers and storage
• Simplified management of physical and virtual data center infrastructure, to expose policy-based advanced fabric services
• Open standards interfaces to simplify integration with Brocade server, storage, and infrastructure management partner frameworks
• Unified management for both Brocade Fabric OS (FOS) and Brocade M-Enterprise OS (M-EOS)

Reliable, Scalable, and Secure IP Network Management

Brocade IronView Network Manager (INM) provides tools for configuring, managing, monitoring, and securing the Brocade family of wired and wireless Ethernet products. It is an intelligent network management solution that reduces the complexity of changing, monitoring, and managing network-wide features such as Access Control Lists (ACLs), rate limiting policies, Virtual LANs (VLANs), software and configuration updates, and network alarms and events.

Using Brocade INM, organizations can automatically discover Brocade network equipment and immediately acquire, view, and archive configurations for each device. In addition, they can easily configure and deploy group policies for wired and wireless products.

Brocade INM utilizes a high-speed, secure architecture with integrated sFlow technology to provide hardware-based real-time network monitoring and accounting capabilities. These features enable wire-speed switching and routing performance with “always-on” fault and performance management, capacity planning intrusion detection, security policing, and precise network traffic accounting.

Brocade INM provides the following key functions:

• Industry’s first network manager to deliver unified management of wired, wireless, and MPLS services from a single application
• Comprehensive Fault, Configuration, Accounting, Performance, and Security (FCAPS) management across the Brocade IP networking product family
• Flexible, scalable architecture that can manage thousands of Brocade and third-party devices in large organizations with highly distributed environments
• Dashboard and thumbnail views of wired and wireless devices, current status, event and alarm summary, and network visibility for troubleshooting and analysis
• Comprehensive security management capabilities, including Brocade IronShield 360 Closed-Loop Security
• Network topology discovery with Layer 2, VLAN, IP subnet, STP/RSTP, MRP Ring, and MPLS views, as well as multiple layout and sizing tools
• Rapid deployment of group network and policy changes to reduce operating expenses
• Standards-based, highly secure network management system built on Java, SNMP, and sFlow (RFC 3176)

• Data Sheets

  • SAN Infrastructure Services Overview (527 KB)

• Success Stories

  • SAP Americas: Boosting SAN Capacity for Booming Managed Services Business (171.7 KB)

• Technical Briefs

  • How to Configure NPIV in a Microsoft Hyper-V Environment (302.9 KB)

  • Migrating from Brocade EFCM to Brocade DCFM (606.6 KB)

  • Migrating from Brocade Fabric Manager to Brocade DCFM (562.1 KB)

• White Papers

  • Brocade DCFM: Unified Fabric Management in the Evolving Data Center (2.3 MB)