Brocade measures health of storage area networks
Brocade measures health of storage area networks
- By Susan M. Menke
- Oct 11, 2004
The free SAN Health utility from Brocade Communications Systems Inc. can inventory and assess the performance of storage area networks built from the company's devices and those of its partners.
The San Jose, Calif., vendor's utility produces graphical reports and topology diagrams in Microsoft Visio format. The report details the health of switches, fabrics, individual ports and recommended best practices.
Users must register at
www.brocade.com to receive the client download, which consists of a small Microsoft Windows application or an Extensible Markup Language version. Data capture and report computations take place on the company's own servers.
'Our installed base in the government wants to expand their SANs,' federal sales director Nick Urich said. He said the Air Force, the Army, NASA, the Navy-Marine Corps Intranet office and intelligence agencies have bought the company's Fibre Channel switches, multiprotocol routers and director devices, which connect servers to storage devices. Brocade products are sold on several governmentwide acquisition contracts and General Services Administration schedule contracts.
Brocade engineer Steve Wynne said there have been 'more than a thousand SAN Health checks' so far and that the users 'have said they like the point-in-time diagram and the detailed inventory.'
Gartner Inc. of Stamford, Conn., predicted in a survey last month that the worldwide SAN market would grow to $4.9 billion by 2008, with almost half of the growth occurring in North America.