Brocade Network Advisor
Unified Network Management for Data, Storage, and Converged Networks
Overview:
Under pressure to reduce costs, free up resources, and accelerate the introduction of cloud services, many organizations are standardizing their operational processes and policies. Operations teams are seeking ways to get ahead of performance issues and ensure maximum availability. Focus on the network is critical to avoid unexpected downtime, reduce ongoing operational costs, and enable IT and business agility
Brocade Network Advisor simplifies daily network operations with customizable dashboards that enable administrators to identify network problems quickly and maintain network availability. It unifies management of the Brocade IP and SAN portfolio, and integrates with third-party solutions, reducing the number of tools needed for end-to-end network visibility and control. In addition, Brocade Network Advisor unifies network monitoring to ensure critical systems are always up and running by providing discovery, troubleshooting, and reporting for Brocade IP, Ruckus Wireless, and SAN products. Brocade Network Advisor also automates repetitive tasks, enabling network teams to focus on proactively managing their network resources.
Highlights
- Simplifies network operations with an intuitive interface and customizable dashboards
- Provides unprecedented visibility through integration with Brocade fabric technologies
- Reduces costs by automating tasks across the network operations lifecycle
- Unifies management of Fibre Channel and IP storage network devices
- Integrates seamlessly with industryleading management solutions from Microsoft, VMware, EMC, HP, and IBM, maximizing the value of IT investments
SAN
- Faster availability for less cost
Get ahead of potential problems before they have a chance to affect your network’s performance. Brocade Network Advisor helps simplify your SAN operations with fast visibility and deeper insights. - Troubleshoot quickly
Find bottlenecks before performance is affected. Brocade Network Advisor helps you find fabric congestion fast - Dive deeper
Identify, monitor, and analyze data flows at the application level to manage your network capacity more efficiently. - Bring the physical and virtual together
Brocade Network Advisor works seamlessly with virtualization technologies for complete VM-to-LUN visibility and management.
Campus
- High capacity, Brocade simplicity
Video conferencing. Real-time collaboration. Distance learning. Brocade Network Advisor makes sure that your network is able to handle your most intensive and complex networking traffic demands—and that your resources are optimized for full performance. - Complete and comprehensive
From the edge to the host, Brocade Network Advisor gives you complete visibility into your network. - Highly Configurable
Discover, manage, and deploy configurations to groups of devices.
Datacenter
- Built for the future
Simple. Powerful. - Proactive and intelligent
Identify where traffic is moving—or isn’t moving—through your network fabric. You can also see where bandwidth is the heaviest, and—most importantly — where potential hot spots are forming. - Automated — and fast
See Ethernet traffic paths and pinpoint bottlenecks fast. Automate your tasks to help reduce TCO.
Routing
- Built for the future
Simple. Powerful. Built with an open architecture and enabled for the cloud, Brocade Network Advisor works seamlessly with the Brocade MLX Series to manage the network operations lifecycle. - Simplified management
Brocade Network Advisor provides the easy-to-use MPLS Manager, which can help configure, monitor, and manage VPLS and Virtual Leased Line (VLL) services across networks that are based on Brocade routers. - Keep downtime down
sFlow-based technology utilized by Brocade Network Advisor reduces network downtime with proactive monitoring, traffic analysis, and reporting.
Fast, Proactive Insights Across Your Network
The Brocade Network Advisor is the full network-lifecycle tool that brings all your information together into one simple, easy to use command-and-control application. Just turn it on and start working—all of Brocade’s best practices are built in.
More Insights
Get in front of potential problems with monitoring, troubleshooting, configuration, and reporting capabilities available right out of the box. With Brocade Network Advisor, you can spot issues and trends over time and take action on them, fast.
Easy Interaction
Manage your physical and virtual networks from a single console. Brocade Network Advisor makes it easy to integrate a wide range of virtualization technologies, storage management platforms, and third-party devices.
Better Communications
All team members can access high-level dashboards, inventory, event and report views in one intuitive interface. Easily share your information with others in your organization or with partners—without having to step foot in your data center.
Features:
More Effective Network Operations
Brocade Network Advisor helps network teams efficiently manage the network operations lifecycle, including monitoring, diagnostics, change management, and troubleshooting. Brocade Network Advisor saves time and enables IT and business agility through:
- Customizable, browser-accessible dashboards: Proactively identify problem areas and prevent network downtime with at-a-glance summaries of all discovered Brocade devices and third-party IP devices.
- Performance reporting: Gain visibility into real-time and historical performance data for advanced troubleshooting and performance management.
- Point-in-time analysis: Filter dashboards to observe and report on trends, and use the playback feature to quickly identify errors that might have caused a network event.
- Network scope: Use simple, customizable filters to focus all dashboard widgets on a specific segment of the network, such as a department or device type.
- Virtual infrastructure: See Virtual Machine (VM) connectivity in topologies and sFlow reports, and use event insights to enhance network troubleshooting through VMware integrations.
- Role-Based Access Control (RBAC): Define granular administrator roles and privileges to support the needs of different SAN and IP network teams.
- Event management: Receive SNMP traps, syslog event messages, and customizable event alerts for reporting, analysis, and remediation.
- Advanced Call Home: Automatically collect diagnostic information and send notifications for faster fault detection, isolation, and remote support operations.
Data Center Storage Networks
Brocade Network Advisor simplifies management of data center fabrics with its performance dashboards, easy-touse interface, and automation features. Storage and server administrators can proactively manage their storage network environments to support non-stop networking, address issues before they impact operations, and minimize manual tasks. Key capabilities and features include:
- Consolidated storage views: See both Gen 5 Fibre Channel and IP storage devices from a single, pre-defined storage dashboard—or view networks separately via individual storage dashboards.
- Configuration and Operational Monitoring Policy Automation Services Suite: Guard against drift from preferred configuration settings with configuration and policy violation monitoring, highlighted in dashboards.
- Multiprotocol support: Automate manual operations with configuration wizards for Fibre Channel SANs, FICON and cascaded FICON environments, Fibre Channel over IP (FCIP) tunnels, and Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) networks.
- Out of Range Violations widget: Identify devices or ports with the most demanding traffic flows for proactive capacity planning.
- VM-to-storage visibility: Easily integrate insights from leading virtualization solutions for VM-to-LUN visibility and management.
- Multivendor adapter management: Monitor and report on Emulex and QLogic adapter properties for a more holistic view of the SAN.
Brocade Fabric Vision Technology
Brocade Network Advisor integrates with Brocade Fabric Vision™ technology to provide unprecedented visibility and insight across storage networks. Brocade Network Advisor supports the following Brocade Fabric Vision technology features:
- Monitoring and Alerting Policy Suite (MAPS): Apply pre-built, customizable rules and policies to multiple ports, switches, or fabrics in a single click and instantly visualize health and performance statistics of the SAN infrastructure in the dashboard, topology, and event views. Click through wizards to adjust configurations to ensure availability is maintained; minimal expertise is required.
- Fabric Performance Impact (FPI) Monitoring: Set pre-defined thresholds in a single click from MAPS and take action on latency alerts highlighted in the dashboard or via e-mail. Use customizable topology views to visually pinpoint which devices and hosts are impacted by a bottlenecked port. Use the wizard and right-click menus to diagnose and troubleshoot before performance begins to degrade.
- Brocade ClearLink Diagnostics: Configure ports to diagnostic mode and view reports to validate optic and cable signal integrity before deployment.
- Flow Vision: Automatically configure application flows from the network topology view to accelerate and simplify troubleshooting and maximize performance.
- Single-dialog bulk configuration: Reduce time spent on repetitive tasks by deploying MAPS policies and rules across the fabric from a single dialog.
Enterprise Campus Networks
Brocade Network Advisor provides management for increasingly complex enterprise campus networks that support services such as video conferencing, realtime collaboration, and distance learning. Brocade Network Advisor helps network administrators deliver highly available wired and wireless networks by enabling:
- Customizable health and performance dashboards: Focus attention on the most critical health and performance indicators for the campus network.
- Brocade campus fabrics: Discover, configure, and manage firmware updates of campus fabrics as one product.
- Discovery and monitoring: Consolidate discovery and monitoring of wired and wireless solutions, including Ruckus Access Points (APs) and wireless controllers.
- Policy monitoring: Configure multiple check options, including end-to-end VLAN consistency.
- Real-time alerts: Receive instant notifications when users deviate from customizable configuration policies, ensuring compliance standards are maintained.
- Report for audit and compliance: Create and export reports for wired products and APs using pre-built templates that can be easily customized
Metro and Carrier Ethernet Networks
Service providers must address the exponential growth in network traffic by helping to reduce operational costs, prevent bandwidth over-provisioning, and improve user service provisioning. Brocade Network Advisor helps service providers achieve these goals by providing:
- Discovery, monitoring, deployment, management, and configuration capabilities for metro and Carrier Ethernet networks
- Comprehensive MPLS service management with support for MPLS Virtual Private LAN Services (VPLS), Label Switched Path (LSP), Local VPLS, Virtual Leased Line (VLL), and Local VLL services
- The ability to detect, isolate, and report Ethernet faults with full support for the IEEE 802.1ag Connectivity Fault Management (CFM) set of standards
Advanced Management for VCS Fabrics
Brocade Network Advisor allows organizations to maximize their Brocade VCS Fabric technology investments by enabling advanced management of Brocade VCS fabrics and Brocade VDX® switches.
- Flexible management options: Manage a VCS fabric as a single entity or logical chassis, or drill down to individual Brocade VDX switches.
- VCS fabric visibility: Gain end-to-end visibility from the data center edge to hosts and VMs, as well as across multiple VCS fabrics and at individual node levels.
- VCS fabric diagnostics: Visualize traffic paths, measure network latency, and perform fault isolation via hop-by-hop inspection to pinpoint bottlenecks.
- sFlow-based monitoring: Achieve VM-level monitoring and gain application performance insights through this integration.
- Firmware management: Receive non-disruptive firmware updates for the entire VCS fabric or for a subset of Brocade VDX switches within the fabric.
- VCS Virtual Fabric management: Create, edit, and delete virtual fabrics.
- Automatic Migration of Port Profiles (AMPP) Management: Create, read, inventory, delete, associate, and disassociate port profiles to VMs. Rapidly associate port profiles and VMware port groups managed by a single or multiple VMware vCenter servers. Perform integrity checks of the port profiles across Brocade VDX switch configurations, either in the same fabric or across different VCS fabrics.
Flexibility through Partner Integration
To ensure organizations maximize their existing investments, Brocade Network Advisor integrates with a wide range of network management solutions—including tools from VMware, Microsoft, HP, EMC, and IBM—to provide end-to-end network visibility. Organizations also have the flexibility to extract data directly from Brocade Network Advisor for integration with homegrown applications through Open Database Connectivity (ODBC), or SMI-S.
Integration options include:
- Brocade Network Advisor REST APIs (SAN): Enables third-party applications to leverage REST services to access Brocade Fabric Vision performance data, events, dashboard summaries, SAN zoning, and inventory. This enables further programmability and paves the way for cloud, virtual, and SoftwareDefined Networking (SDN).
- Brocade integrations with VMware vRealize Operations Insight: Delivers health, risk, and efficiency insights from Brocade fabric technologies to dashboards in VMware vRealize Operations, enabling faster root-cause analysis and better VM and application performance. The vRealize Log Insight integration helps virtualization and cloud teams further troubleshoot from within vRealize, by presenting Brocade SAN and IP device log data.
- Brocade Management Pack for Microsoft System Center Operations Manager (SCOM): Provides visibility into the network connectivity of Microsoft SCOM servers and proactively responds to bottlenecks through policy-based actions.
Supported Technologies and Platforms
Brocade Network Advisor supports the entire Brocade portfolio, unifying network management under a single tool.
Supported platforms and hardware include:
- Brocade DCX Backbones
- Brocade FastIron SX Series
- Brocade FastIron WS Series
- Brocade ICX switches
- Brocade MLX Series
- Brocade MLXe Core Routers
- Brocade CER 2000 Series
- Brocade SAN switches
- Brocade VDX switches
- Brocade vRouters
- QLogic and Emulex adapters
- Ruckus Wireless products
Brocade Global Services
Brocade Global Services has the expertise to help organizations build scalable, efficient cloud infrastructures. Leveraging 20 years of expertise in storage, networking, and virtualization, Brocade Global Services delivers worldclass professional services, technical support, and education services, enabling organizations to maximize their Brocade investments, accelerate new technology deployments, and optimize the performance of networking infrastructures.
Training and Education
Brocade Global Education Services offers Web-based training and instructor-led courses to share product information, tips, and best practices—and to provide hands-on experience with Brocade Network Advisor.
Acquisition Options That Match Balance Sheet Objectives
Successful network deployments drive business forward, providing technical and financial agility. Brocade offers the broadest financing models, from traditional leasing to Brocade Network Subscription. Network-as-a-Service allows organizations to subscribe to network assets today then upgrade on demand, scale up or down, or return them with 60-day notification. Brocade Network Subscription plans can be structured to meet IASC guidelines for OpEx or CapEx treatment to align with financial goals.
Maximizing Investments
To help optimize technology investments, Brocade and its partners offer complete solutions that include professional services, technical support, and education.
System Requirements:
Brocade Network Advisor software and documentation are available via download.
| Brocade vPacket Broker Specifications | |
|---|---|
| Supported Client and Server Operating Systems |
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| Server Requirements | For 64-bit Windows and Linux systems, Intel Core 2 Duo Dual-CPU, 2.4 GHz or equivalent, 8 to 16 GB RAM, 80 GB disk is required. 16 GB RAM is required for the SAN+IP bundle, and medium or large networks. |
| Browser Support | Windows versions of Firefox, Internet Explorer, and Chrome are supported. |
| Software Evaluation | A 120-day, full-featured evaluation version of Brocade Network Advisor is available for download from www.brocade.com/networkadvisor. Install the software in minutes and start managing your network more effectively today. |
Documentation:
Download the Brocade Network Advisor Datasheet(PDF).