Brocade Intros Unified Network Management Platform for SAN and IP Networks

By Anshu Shrivastava, TMCnet Contributor

Brocade (News - Alert) has announced Brocade Network Advisor, a unified network management platform for SAN and IP networks.

The new platform provides a single management solution across Brocade Fibre Channel SANs, IP networks, fibre channel over Ethernet (FCoE) networks, wireless networks and multiprotocol label switching (MPLS) networks.

Company officials said that the latest offering is designed to support the four Brocade One value propositions of “unmatched simplicity, non-stop networking, optimized applications and investment protection” to provide “unique benefits” to customers with data center, enterprise campus and service provider networks:

Brocade Network Advisor delivers comprehensive lifecycle management capabilities such as configuration, monitoring, management and reporting across the entire Brocade networking portfolio. Company officials said that all this is provided from a single GUI. Moreover, role-based access control (RBAC) capabilities provide fine-grained management over networking resources and a detailed audit of change activities.

Thanks to unified end-user experience across different network types, customers can embrace convergence technologies -- FCoE, wired/wireless, VoIP and unified communications -- at their own pace with a minimal learning curve for their administrators as they transition to these new technologies.

Company officials said that the new product reduces network downtime and increases network security with proactive network monitoring, traffic analysis, fault isolation, change management and policy-driven remedial actions.

It features a rule engine that enables definition of policies, including automated trigger actions such as execution of predefined scripts, and e-mail or pager notifications. Plus, Advanced Call Home capabilities allow customers to configure Brocade Network Advisor to proactively notify their support organization before any issues impact services.

Additionally, Brocade Network Advisor optimizes application traffic and performance to manage service level agreements (SLAs) via end-to-end network monitoring, automation and policy management.

Company officials said that it provides tight integration via standards-based APIs with partner products for server management, storage management, virtualization management and data center orchestration.

Jason Nolet (News - Alert), vice president for Data Center and Enterprise Networking Group at Brocade, said that customers are experiencing “significantly” high operating expenses associated with disparate islands of tools and fragmented lifecycle management processes.

“Brocade Network Advisor addresses these pain points with a robust, scalable architecture that integrates SAN, Ethernet, MPLS and wireless management into a single, cohesive management application,” Nolet said.

Brocade Network Advisor is scheduled to be available in November 2010.

Earlier this month, Brocade released Brocade MLXe Core Router as part of its Brocade MLX Series of high-density routers.

(source: http://it.tmcnet.com/channels/network-management/articles/106360-brocade-intros-unified-network-management-platform-san-ip.htm)