Simplified Management And Robust Network Analytics - IBM SAN24B-6 Product Manual

VM Insight is the newest feature in Fabric Vision technology, enabling proactive visibility into
the health and performance of individual VMs with integrated sensors. Using this capability,
administrators can quickly identify abnormal VM behaviors to facilitate troubleshooting and
fault isolation, helping to ensure maximum performance and operational stability.
Forward Error Correction (FEC) capabilities further increase resiliency by automatically
detecting and recovering network transmission errors. To ensure predictable performance
before deployment, organizations can validate infrastructure with the ClearLink Diagnostics
and Flow Generator features.

Simplified management and robust network analytics

Fabric Vision technology provides unprecedented insight and visibility across the storage
network, with powerful integrated monitoring, management, and diagnostic capabilities.
These innovative features enable administrators to avoid problems before they impact
operations, helping organizations meet SLAs. Fabric Vision technology includes these
features:
VM Insight: Seamlessly monitors VM performance throughout a storage fabric with
standards-based, end-to-end VM tagging. Administrators can quickly determine the
source of VM/application performance anomalies, as well as provision and fine-tune the
infrastructure based on VM/application requirements to meet service-level objectives.
Monitoring and Alerting Policy Suite (MAPS): Leverages prebuilt, rule-/policy-based
templates within MAPS to simplify fabric-wide threshold configuration, monitoring, and
alerting. Administrators can configure the entire fabric (or multiple fabrics) at one time
using common rules and policies, or customize policies for specific ports or switch
elements. With Flow Vision and VM Insight, administrators set thresholds for VM flow
metrics in MAPS policies to be notified of VM performance degradation.
Fabric Performance Impact (FPI) Monitoring: Uses predefined MAPS policies to
automatically detect and alert administrators to different latency severity levels, and to
identify slow-drain devices that could affect network performance. This feature identifies
various latency severity levels, pinpointing exactly which devices are causing or are
affected by a bottlenecked port, and quarantines automatically slow-drain devices to
prevent buffer credit starvation.
Dashboards: Provides integrated dashboards that display an overall storage area
network (SAN) health view, along with details about out-of-range conditions, to help
administrators easily identify trends and quickly pinpoint issues occurring on a switch or in
a fabric.
Configuration and Operational Monitoring Policy Automation Services Suite
(COMPASS): Simplifies deployment, safeguards consistency, and increases operational
efficiencies of larger environments with automated switch and fabric configuration
services. Administrators can configure a template or adopt an existing configuration to
seamlessly deploy a configuration across the fabric. In addition, they can ensure that
settings do not drift over time with COMPASS configuration and policy violation monitoring
within IBM Network Advisor dashboards.
ClearLink Diagnostics: Ensures optical and signal integrity for Fibre Channel optics and
cables, simplifying deployment and support of high-performance fabrics. ClearLink
Diagnostic Port (D_Port) is an advanced capability of Fibre Channel platforms.
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