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Ask The Expert: Connectrix FOS 7.3 – Fabric Vision Proactive Capabilities
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| Ask the Expert: All about VMAX performance best practices |
Welcome to this December Ask the Expert event. Its been a busy 2014, with lots of challenges. But we hope, in some small part that the series of Ask the Expert events helped you meet those challenges . As we move into wrap up mode on Ask the Expert in December, we certainly don't take anything off the pace of events and offer another discussion opportunity to you on Connectrix FOS 7.3 and the new integrated Fabric Vision capabilities.
In particular this discussion will address proactive capabilities to manage your products and maximize availability.
This Ask The Expert discussion will allow users to understand the new Fabric Vision capabilities by engaging with top technical experts from Brocade and EMC. The discussion will provide greater detail on the following capabilities:
- Monitoring and Alerting Policy Suite (MAPS): Provides a new, easy-to-use solution for policy-based threshold monitoring and alerting. MAPS proactively monitors the health and performance of the SAN infrastructure to ensure application uptime and availability.
- Connectrix B-Series ClearLink diagnostics: Ensures optical and signal integrity for Gen 5 Fibre Channel optics and cables, simplifying deployment and support of high-performance fabrics.
- Flow Vision: A comprehensive tool that enables administrators to identify, monitor, and analyze specific application data flows in order to maximize performance, avoid congestion, and optimize resources.
- Integration into Connectrix Manager: CMCNE simplifies Gen 5 Fibre Channel management and helps users proactively diagnose and resolve issues to maximize uptime, increase operational efficiency and reduce costs.
- Fabric Performance Impact (FPI) Monitoring: Uses pre-defined thresholds and alerts in conjunction with MAPS to automatically detect and alert administrators to severe levels of latency and identifies slow drain devices that might impact the network.
EARN ECN BADGES!
Check out this 3-minute video on the new Fabric Vision capabilities to earn the brand new "Video Visionary" badge. By participating in this discussion and commenting on a new Connectrix blog post, you can also earn other badges through the "Connectrix Experience Optimizer" RAMP Mission.
Meet Your Experts:
For this discussion, we have a rock-star team with diverse and deep experience working with Fabric Vision technology and customers.
| Director, OEM Systems Engineering, Brocade Michelle Hughes has held multiple roles at EMC and Brocade as both a Technical Support Engineer and OEM (Original Equipment Manufacturer) Systems Engineer. She is currently the Director of OEM Systems Engineering at Brocade. Michelle’s robust technical skill set includes expertise in fibre channel, Ethernet fabrics and EMC storage technologies. |
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Director, OEM Business Development, Brocade Mike Naylor is Director of OEM (Original Equipment Manufacturer) Business Development at Brocade. Mike has 25+ years of experience working in the technology industry, including over 8 years focused on integrating Brocade capabilities with EMC products. He is an expert in storage networking. |
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Consulting Systems Engineer, Connectrix, EMC Bill Sleck has been part of the EMC family for 17 years and has held positions in Enterprise and Midmarket as an account Systems Engineer (10 years), at OEM (Original Equipment Manufacturer) partners, and in his current role as a Consulting Corporate Systems Engineer and Program Manager on the EMC Global Connectrix team. |
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| Bill Cross Global Services Product Manager, Connectrix, EMC Bill Cross is a Global Services Product Manager with EMC and has supported the Connectrix family of products for over 16 years. His experience includes 12 years focused on driving quality and reliability into EMC products as a member of the Corporate Quality team and 4 years in his current role. |
This discussion takes place from December 8th - Jan.26th (Note: There may be a delay in response from Dec. 23-Jan.5 given the US holiday schedule). Get ready by bookmarking this page or signing up for e-mail notifications.
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MikeN2
6 Posts
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December 11th, 2014 07:00
Hi Sandip,
As a Brocade employee it would be a lot of fun to get into a Brocade vs. competitors debate, but this is an EMC forum and since EMC has partnerships with said competitors we will respect our EMC partnership and *NOT* get into any direct comparisons.
Alternatively it may be worth comparing the before and after Fabric Vision versions from Brocade.
I will start by saying we felt our pre fabric Vision solution was very competitive and our dominant market share would lend some credibility to that statement. So this is not meant to be a knock against older version of FOS ... it has served many very well for a long time!
For this post lets compare MAPS to Fabric Watch and Advanced Performance Monitoring.
Brocade Fabric Watch and Advanced Performance monitoring pre-dated the MAPS feature and Fabric Vision. They were powerful tools but they were rarely used because they required you to invest a lot of time to understand, implement, and interpret the results ... and as your SAN grew over time ongoing maintenance was required.
With MAPS it is so much easier. The MAPS architecture of having a few categories of port (and other) types and a few policies to apply enables you to simply choose from column A (categories) and choose from column B (policy) and that easily your implementation is underway. New ports in the same category are automatically added. If you want to customize you can tweak until the cows come home, but your changes are now embedded in this new category/policy architecture, so even customization is easy to implement and manage going forward.
Understanding the MAPS results is improved compared to FW and APN, in particular when MAPS is combined with the new BNA/CMCNE versions with enhanced dashboard capability... the results are not only shown as widgets on the dashboard, but you also have the ability to "DVR" back in time now which I think is one of the most important new features.
I should also point out that when comparing the new MAPS to the older FW and APN, it is not just ease of use that is improved, MAPS is also a lot more powerful too. For example MAPS policies can be compound versus FW policies which were binary. You can look for C3 discards for both long and short intervals is a basic example.
I know that Brocade had our best product managers and engineers working on this for 2+ years so we had high expectations. Honestly I think the results of the efforts show and I think that Fabric Vision MAPS is is easily an order of magnitude more powerful than the old Brocade FW and APN and also compared to the old industry status quo.
We'll write about Flow Vision (which has no comparison from the past) in a separate post.
lakaspalay
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15 Posts
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December 11th, 2014 09:00
Is there any ATE thread for the CMCNE? Hoping they will have a roadmap for linux version like the BNA.
hughesm1
3 Posts
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December 11th, 2014 11:00
Hi Dali,
This ‘Ask the Expert’ session is focused on “Fabric Vision” so we don’t want to get too much off topic. I would be more than happy to take this offline with you and get you the information that you need.
Please note that all security enhancements along with other new capabilities are noted in the 7.3 release notes which can be downloaded from Powerlink.
Thanks,
Michelle
hughesm1
3 Posts
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December 11th, 2014 19:00
Hi,
Currently there is no ATE thread on CMCNE, but great suggestion!. EMC are best to answer the question with respect to the support of CMCNE on a Linux platform, today this is not supported.
Thanks,
Michelle
blayne1
1 Message
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December 11th, 2014 23:00
Continuing with Mr. Naylor's "competitive" discussion between legacy Brocade capabilities and the latest Fabric Vision technology features, I would like to focus on the new Fabric Performance Impact (FPI) Monitoring capability introduced in Fabric OS v7.3 as an enhancement to MAPS. Prior to FPI monitoring, Brocade already provided the industry's best capability to detect devices exhibiting high levels of latency, also known as a "slow drain device" or "SDD". This capability was part of the Bottleneck Monitoring feature (often referred to as Bottleneck Detection or BD), a hardware-integrated feature first released in FOS v6.3 and enhanced over the years since.
Many customers have taken advantage of BD to help identify sources of latency and resulting bottlenecks in their SANs. These conditions, if left unresolved, can result in serious performance impacts on applications. And these impacts are not isolated to just those devices communicating with the offending slow drain device - they can impact any application flow that happens to be sharing common paths (ISLs) in the fabric with flows to/from the SDD.
However, even with the capability that BD provides, Brocade realized we could do better. First, we wanted to even further simplify the configuration of SDD detection. Next, we wanted to ensure that when these conditions are detected, it is very clear to the SAN administrator that there is a serious problem that needs to be addressed, and precisely which device is causing the problem. And finally, we wanted to provide a way to detect the different types of device latency conditions that can manifest in a FC SAN, without forcing the SAN Admin to pick one type of detection over another.
With these objectives in mind, Brocade introduced FPI Monitoring in MAPS in FOS v7.3. FPI is fully integrated into MAPS, meaning it is part of the default MAPS policies provided for all users. And not only did we simplify the configuration compared to legacy Bottleneck Monitoring, we made it so that there is no configuration at all. None. Zip. Zilch. It is turned on automatically as part of enabling MAPS on a switch and that's it.
How did we do this? Well, based on our years of collaboration with customers managing the largest, most complex data centers in the world, combined with having the most advanced FC ASICs in the industry, we have designed a capability that can simultaneously monitor for different types of SDD conditions on every device port in our Gen 5 FC switches all the time. FPI actually looks at different thresholds of device latency conditions over different time intervals, allowing it to detect not only sudden, temporary, severe latency conditions, but also lower level but sustained latency conditions. And it has the ability to predict when an SDD device is causing an impact that may soon cause frames to be dropped due to timeout conditions. And of course, any alerts issued by FPI monitoring from one of our switches is presented in easy to read, highly visible dashboards in our CMCNE management software so the SAN Admin knows when to take action to avoid a major incident.
Apologies for such a lengthy post, but FPI monitoring is one of the many new features and enhancements to Fabric Vision that we're really excited about - and customers that we've spoken to are excited.as well. This capability certainly raises the bar for monitoring of conditions that can impact your applications' performance in a FC SAN.
BillC2
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December 12th, 2014 05:00
Hi Michelle and Lakaspalay,
To my knowledge this is our first ever ATE for a Connectrix B-Series product. It appears to be well received so maybe in the near future an ATE for CMCNE/BNA would be great to have!
Michelle you are correct, EMC does not have any plans to support CMCNE on a Linux platform. Sorry.
lakaspalay
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15 Posts
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December 12th, 2014 08:00
But we can use our CMCNE license to have a BNA in linux platform? Is this supported by EMC.
The reason to shift our san management platform to linux is that CMCNE is late to update and java client release updates more often. Im currently running in CMCNE 11.x and hoping the 12.x version supports the latest java client updates.
BillC2
18 Posts
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December 12th, 2014 10:00
Hi Lakaspalay
This session is focused around Fabric Vision so I’d prefer not to go down a CMCNE discussion path. That being said, I have no problem taking this subject offline to try and resolve your issue.
StefanNett
15 Posts
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December 14th, 2014 23:00
Hi,
Are there any e-lerning courses around this topic?
Thanks,
Stefan
hughesm1
3 Posts
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December 15th, 2014 12:00
Hi Stefan,
We do offer a Brocade Fabric ResiliencyFR100 WBT course which is free of charge, you can use your My.Brocade.com login to register and complete this class.
Please let me know if you need any more information or assistance.
Thanks,
Michelle
StefanNett
15 Posts
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December 15th, 2014 23:00
Hi Michelle,
Thank you very much for your help!
With your guidance I found the course with only a few clicks.
Best wishes,
Stefan
sddc_guy
159 Posts
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April 4th, 2015 02:00
is scom integration still in fabric vision ?
Anonymous
5 Practitioner
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274.2K Posts
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April 7th, 2015 16:00
SCOM is a plug-in for CMCNE, it does report back some of the suite of Fabric Vision functions.
The SCOM console displays the following information:
◆ Fabric and switch details
◆ End-to-end monitor statistics
◆ Events from the Management application when Critical events
for switches in the fabric trigger CallHome in the Management
application
Anonymous
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274.2K Posts
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April 8th, 2015 13:00
I’ve attached the Brocade SCOM Solution Brief.
Bill Sleck | Corp. Systems Engineer
Field Enablement - Global Connectrix Team
EMC Core Technologies
M: +1 612.875.6809
From: Sleck, Bill
Sent: Tuesday, April 07, 2015 6:07 PM
To:
Subject: Re: - Ask The Expert: Connectrix FOS 7.3 – Fabric Vision Proactive Capabilities
SCOM is a plug-in for CMCNE, it does report back some of the suite of Fabric Vision functions.
The SCOM console displays the following information:
◆ Fabric and switch details
◆ End-to-end monitor statistics
◆ Events from the Management application when Critical events
for switches in the fabric trigger CallHome in the Management
application
Sent from my iPhone
Bill Sleck
612-875-6809
2 Attachments
image001.jpg
SCOM_SolutionsBrief_GA-SB-1525.pdf
TimH
100 Posts
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December 4th, 2015 15:00
Thanks for that doc Bill.