Technical data

DATA CENTER TECHNICAL BRIEF
Operational Simplicity: Automating and Simplifying SAN Provisioning 11 of 15
fig04_Operational_Simplicity
16 Gbps
SAN Edge
16 Gbps
SAN Core
Figure 6. ClearLink infrastructure validation.
If the data centers are interconnected over dark ber for workload migration and replication, assessing the
distance and latency tolerance becomes critical for maintaining application uptime. SAN administrators can now
use ClearLink diagnostics to measure the latency and cable distance to a granularity of 16.4 feet (5 meters),
without having to contact network engineers. This reduces unnecessary organizational delays in identifying
application performance impacts due to cable or path rerouting issues over a metro DWDM link.
Once the physical infrastructure is veried, SAN administrators can leverage Fabric Vision technology’s Flow
Generator capabilities to measure ow performance before deploying applications into production to ensure
they meet the required SLA. Flow Generator allows administrators to emulate a fully loaded Gen 5 Fibre Channel
SAN with all Brocade FOS features enabled without actually having any 16 Gbps hosts, targets, or SAN testers
available. This built-in test capability negates the need for third party trafc generator equipment, as well as
allows performance validation to be performed in advance of implementing new servers or storage, reducing risk
and accelerating deployment.
Pre-ProvisioningofZones
Customers can plan ahead and pre-provision servers before they are connected to the switch ports in the SAN.
This is a one-time procedure. Servers can be moved or replaced in the fabric without having to modify the zone
database or make any changes to fabric services, like booting over SAN, QoS, or DCC policies that use WWN.
By pre-provisioning the servers to storage, SAN administrators can reduce the time to bring resources online
from an error-prone manual process to a plug-and-play model. The SAN administrators do not need to know the
pWWNs of the servers while they congure the servers in the fabric. When an actual server is connected to the
switch, or moved or replaced, there are no changes to zone administration. For example, in the private cloud
architecture, a VM needs to be created on-demand in a self-service manner for internal customers. With DFP,
multiple 2-Terabyte (TB) LUNs can be pre-provisioned to physical servers to automate the storage provisioning.
This removes the interaction between server and storage administrators in order to ultimately support a self-
service model. When a new workload needs to be created in the physical server, a chunk of the 2 TB can be
assigned per VM.