Technical data

DATA CENTER TECHNICAL BRIEF
Operational Simplicity: Automating and Simplifying SAN Provisioning 4 of 15
Based on customer need for automated diagnostics, monitoring, and management capabilities, Brocade has
developed innovative solutions in several areas:
•Automated validation of physical infrastructure connectivity
•Automated validation of SAN fabric performance and robustness
•Automated conguration of fabric-wide, threshold-based rules and policies for proactive
monitoring and alerting
•Automated provisioning and administration of zone management
•At-a-glance dashboard views of SAN health and performance
InfrastructureValidationandDiagnostics
Whether building a new SAN or connecting to an existing SAN, pre-staging and validating a fabric prior to putting
it into production ensures that there are baseline metrics in terms of rated throughput, latency, decibel loss
through patch panels, and quality of optic cables as a measure of Cyclic Redundancy Checks (CRCs). Currently,
customers have these two options for validating the physical infrastructure:
•Use SAN test equipment
•Deploy actual devices like servers, storage, and tape libraries that will be supported in production
While the best practice is to use actual devices to validate the infrastructure, equipment may not be available
at the time of staging. Purchasing or leasing SAN test equipment to validate the infrastructure is an added
cost that can easily be addressed by providing the test support in the fabric as part of the SAN functionality.
Once a SAN is in production, most data centers have restricted access or may be remotely managed. Having to
physically place SAN test equipment in-line to troubleshoot issues is not only intrusive and error-prone, but it
can be critically disruptive, if the wrong link is removed for diagnosis.
ValidatingOpticsandCables
The digital diagnostics capabilities that are available with most current transceivers provide generalized
warnings and alert levels that are dened across transceivers from multiple vendors. With the Gen 5 Fibre
Channel Short Wavelength (SWL), Long Wavelength (LWL), and Extended Long Wavelength (ELWL) transceivers,
Brocade provides granular vendor-specic thresholds and ags critical alarms (as listed in Table 1) with Brocade
Fabric Vision technology and Brocade Network Advisor. By proactively monitoring critical transceivers, customers
can quickly address any physical layer issues without the need for special optical testers.
As network speeds increase, media and cable tolerance become critical for avoiding degraded performance and
avoiding CRC errors over time. Brocade designed intelligence into the Brocade FC switching ASICs and worked
with major transceiver vendors so that Gen 5 Fibre Channel Small Form-Factor Pluggables (SFPs) provide link-
level validation, which is commonly provided by SAN test equipment.
Fabric-based physical layer validation testing provides the following benets to customers:
Table 1. Infrastructure Diagnostics
Test Benet
Local and
Long-Distance
Measurements
Checks for cable reroutes within a data center or path reroute over Dense Wavelength-
Division Multiplexing (DWDM) to a distance granularity of 16.4 feet (5 meters)
Latency
Measurements
Measures latency between links within or across data centers for latency-sensitive
applications like Virtual Machine (VM) motion and replication, or for monitoring Service Level
Agreements (SLAs)