Technical data

DATA CENTER TECHNICAL BRIEF
Operational Simplicity: Automating and Simplifying SAN Provisioning 9 of 15
to high priority applications and another group of switch ports attached to low priority applications—and monitor
each group according to its own unique rules.
MAPS also supports multiple alerting mechanisms, including RASlog messages, SNMP traps, email notications,
as well as port fencing when errors exceed the specied threshold. MAPS offers the exibility to monitor a given
counter for different threshold values and take different actions when each threshold value is crossed. For
example, users can monitor a CRC error counter at a switch port and can generate a RASlog when the error rate
reaches two per minute, send an e-mail notication when the error rate is at ve per minute, and fence a port
when the error rate exceeds ten per minute.
Once MAPS policies are enabled, users can easily monitor SAN health and performance using the integrated
dashboard. Available at the switch level via the CLI or at the fabric or multi-fabric level via Brocade Network
Advisor, the MAPS dashboard provides a summary view that shows the overall health of the switch (healthy,
marginal or down) as well as the status of every monitored category including port health; switch status policy;
fabric state changes; FRU health; security violations; switch resources; FCIP health; and trafc performance;
giving administrators a quick view into issues and hot spots. For categories that are out of range, the summary
view also shows the rules that were triggered to accelerate troubleshooting.
In addition to the summary view, the MAPS dashboard provides a historical view to quickly show trends. The
historical view provides raw counter information regardless of whether rules were triggered; giving administrators
instant visibility to statistics such as CRC errors, link resets, and Class 3 TX timeout discards over time.
Brocade Bottleneck Detection is integrated into MAPS, identifying and alerting administrators to device or
ISL congestion as well as abnormal levels of latency in the fabric. Through the MAPS dashboard, users see
bottleneck events that are detected as well as get an instant view of bottlenecked ports in the switch, enabling
faster problem detection and resolution.
Flow Monitor is also integrated into MAPS. Flow Monitor, part of Fabric Vision technology, provides users much
deeper visibility into the application trafc between a host and a target LUN. With Flow Monitor, users get
information on various performance metrics associated with an application ow, such as transmit or receive
frame count, transmit or receive throughput, SCSI Read or Write frame count, number of SCSI Reads and
Writes per second, etc. Whenever NPIV is used on the host, users can monitor Virtual Machine (VM) to LUN
level performance as well. With Flow Vision integrated into MAPS, users can monitor Flow Vision statistics and
generate alerts based on the user-dened rules. By proactively monitoring ows of interest, users know how well
critical applications are performing. If any of those application ows experience performance degradation, users
are notied proactively via MAPS alerts.
ZoneManagement:DynamicFabricProvisioning(DFP)
Zoning is a security mechanism used to specify the devices in the fabric that should be allowed to communicate
with each other. Zoning is based on either port World Wide Name (pWWN) or Domain,Port (D,P). (See the
Secure SAN Zoning Best Practices white paper on www.brocade.com for details.) When using pWWN, the SAN
administrators cannot pre-provision zone assignments until the servers are connected and the WWN name of
the HBAs is known.
As data centers consolidate and increase fabric device density, providing an automatic provisioning tool for SAN
administrators to plan ahead and pre-provision device connectivity becomes imperative. Solutions are necessary
that can simplify customer migrations to truly secure, automated private cloud storage services. The Brocade
Gen 5 Fibre Channel SAN platforms provide an integrated switch and HBA solution that enables customers to
dynamically provision switch-generated virtual WWNs and create a fabric-wide zone database prior to acquiring
and connecting any Brocade HBAs to the switch.
The Brocade fabric-based implementation supports a scalable solution for environments with blade and
rack servers.