Brocade brings in virtual machine visibility for storage networks
The American data and storage networking company Brocade released the Brocade G610 this week - a storage switch for always-on connectivity to the all-flash data center.
Brocade says the switch provides up to 32 Gbps of performance and aims to help organisations adapt to dynamic workloads and new demands.
The entry-level switch is designed for a range of environments from small shared storage fabrics to network edge deployments in data centers and offers access to Gen 6 Fibre Channel storage networking technology.
Organisations can start with eight ports and increase to up to 24 ports per switch.
In addition, Brocade also announced an expansion of their monitoring capabilities through Brocade Fabric Vision technology with the availability of Virtual Machine (VM) Insight.
Brocade's VM Insight aims to provide proactive visibility into the performance of individual virtual machines to help administrators foresee issues before applications are affected.
Jack Rondoni, senior vice president of storage networking at Brocade says "together with our partner ecosystem, Brocade is making it easy and affordable to deploy Fibre Channel solutions while extending monitoring capabilities in Fabric Vision technology so customers can have unparalleled visibility of VM-level application performance within the storage network.
Digital transformation, the adoption of flash storage and the emergence of Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe) are driving new demands for modern infrastructure that can adapt to evolving data center needs and optimise application performance.
Eric Burgener, research director, storage at IDC says the company predicts that by 2020 systems like all-flash arrays for consolidation of mission-critical primary storage workloads will drive over 80% of all primary storage revenues.
He says, "flash's ability to support much denser workload consolidation is demanding higher-performance host connections, and Brocade's new Gen 6 Fibre Channel portfolio provides that bandwidth with a proven, trusted and highly secure protocol.
"Whole-brain imaging is critical to our research but advances in imaging and microscopy place new demands on our network and storage infrastructure every day," says Jake Carroll, senior information technology manager of research, The University of Queensland's Queensland Brain Institute.
Carroll says, "Brocade Gen 6 Fibre Channel solutions massively boost data transfer speeds enabling scientists to maximise the benefits of increased image resolution and high data sampling rates.
With the use of integrated sensors, this new capability allows administrators to monitor VM statistics and quickly identify abnormal VM behaviours.
This facilitates troubleshooting and fault isolation while providing intelligence for early detection of application performance degradations to help support critical service level agreements.
Marty Lans, senior director and general manager of Storage Connectivity at Hewlett Packard Enterprise, a partner of Brocade, says "the combination of HPE 3PAR and Brocade Gen 6 Fibre Channel solutions has the potential to transform businesses of all shapes and sizes, enabling them to derive maximum benefit from investments in technologies like flash, NVMe, cloud and virtualisation."
"The introduction of the new SN3600B Fibre Channel switch bolsters our current Gen 6 Fibre Channel portfolio with a new offering to put Fibre Channel SAN within reach of even more customers," he concludes.
