Brocade aims analytics monitoring platform at Malaysian banks, telcos

• Provides non-invasive end-to-end visibility of infrastructure, company says
• Part of Brocade’s Gen 5 Fibre Channel Portfolio, but can work with Gen 4

BROCADE Communications Systems Inc expects its newly-launched analytics monitoring appliance to be well received by customers in Malaysia, especially those in the financial services and telecommunications sectors.
 
For one, the new Brocade Analytics Monitoring Platform can help organisations reduce the cost of storage systems monitoring, and also give them better visibility of their storage networks, the company said.
 
“Monitoring and analysing IT infrastructure performance has been a complex, time-consuming task that requires complete end-to-end network knowledge,” said Brocade Malaysia country manager Sean Ong (pic above).
 
He said that IT staff typically have two options: To do so manually by using spreadsheets; or by using expensive automated methods that add complexity, create security risks, and which may require downtime to install and configure.
 
“You may find it surprising, but it is still happening. Today, many enterprises rely on guesswork and the accrued experience of IT staff to maintain application service level agreements, and to identify and resolve issues across their compute, network and storage resources,” said Ong.
 
The increasing number of companies demanding 100% network availability puts further pressure on IT staff, as they need to quickly identify and resolve bottlenecks, configuration mistakes, and other conditions that prevent predictable performance for network-connected servers and storage, he added.
 
With the Brocade Analytics Monitoring Platform, which was launched Aug 26 globally and is part of Brocade’s Gen 5 Fibre Channel portfolio, Ong said that companies would be able to take corrective actions for maintaining optimal application performance and uptime.
 
“More importantly, deployment takes just minutes, with zero downtime,” he told a briefing at Brocade Malaysia’s office in Kuala Lumpur.
 
Analytics appliance 

Today, most analytics solutions come in the form of software which has to be installed on servers to monitor IT infrastructure. Not so the Brocade Analytics Monitoring Platform, which comes in the form of an appliance.
 
“With today’s business demand and IT environment, you need a smarter tool to monitor infrastructure. We believe that we are making it simple by coming up with an appliance,” said Ong.
 
“The benefit of our new product is that you don’t have to worry about installation – it’s just plug-and-play.
 
“It is able to monitor the behaviour and response time of any device, without the link quality and performance impacts caused by highly invasive physical test access points (TAPs),” he added.
 
Ong said that Brocade’s analytics platform can give organisations “significant cost savings,” operations-wise.
 
“The monitoring platform not only provides end-to-end visibility that was not available previously, but also improves the ROI (return on investment) for storage infrastructure by providing in-depth, fabric-wide metrics,” he said.
 
Ong also said that the monitoring platform works best with Brocade’s Gen 5 Fibre Channel Portfolio. It can also work with the fourth generation, but he cautioned that user experience may differ.
 
Related Stories:
 
Brocade delivers turnkey SDN solution for the New IP
 
Network transformation with the New IP
 
Brocade: New campus LAN innovations expand 'Effortless' network vision
 
 
For more technology news and the latest updates, follow us on Twitter, LinkedIn or Like us on Facebook.