Ibm Network Advisor; Access Gateway Mode - IBM SAN24B-6 Product Manual

Flow Vision: Enables administrators to identify, monitor and analyze specific application
flows in order to simplify troubleshooting, maximize performance, avoid congestion, and
optimize resources. Flow Vision includes these features:
– Flow Monitor: Provides comprehensive visibility, automatically learns and
nondisruptively monitors flow performance. Administrators can monitor all flows from a
specific host to multiple targets or logical unit numbers (LUNs), from multiple hosts to a
specific target/LUN, or across a specific ISL. Additionally, they can perform LUN-level
monitoring of specific frame types to identify resource contention or congestion that is
affecting application performance. With VM Insight, administrators can monitor network
throughput statistics for each VM.
– Flow Learning: Enables administrators to nondisruptively discover all flows that go to
or come from a specific host port or a storage port, or traverse ISLs/inter-fabric links
(IFLs) or Fibre Channel over IP (FCIP) tunnels, to monitor fabric-wide application
performance. In addition, administrators can discover top and bottom
bandwidth-consuming devices and manage capacity planning.
– Flow Generator: Provides a built-in traffic generator for pretesting and validating your
infrastructure for robustness, including route verification and integrity of optics, paths
and connectors, cables, ports, back-end connections, and ISLs, before deploying
applications.
– Flow Mirroring: Provides the ability to nondisruptively create copies of specific
application and data flows or frame types that can be captured for in-depth analysis.
Forward Error Correction (FEC): Enables recovery from bit errors in device connections
and ISLs, enhancing transmission reliability and performance.
Credit Loss Recovery: Helps overcome performance degradation and congestion due to
buffer credit loss.

IBM Network Advisor

IBM Network Advisor simplifies Gen 6 Fibre Channel management and helps organizations
proactively diagnose and resolve issues to maximize uptime, increase operational efficiency,
and reduce costs. The wizard-driven interface dramatically reduces deployment and
configuration times by allowing fabrics, switches, and ports to be managed as groups.
Customizable dashboards graphically display performance and health indicators out of the
box, including all data captured using Fabric Vision technology.
To accelerate troubleshooting, administrators can use dashboard playback to quickly review
past events and identify problems in the fabric. Dashboards and reports can be also
configured to show only the most relevant data, enabling administrators to more efficiently
prioritize their actions and maintain network performance.
For more information, see the

Access Gateway mode

SAN24B-6 can be deployed as a full-fabric switch or as an Access Gateway, which simplifies
fabric topologies and heterogeneous fabric connectivity (the default mode setting is a switch).
Access Gateway mode utilizes N_Port ID Virtualization (NPIV) switch standards to present
physical and virtual servers directly to the core of SAN fabrics. This configuration makes a
switch in Access Gateway mode transparent to the SAN fabric, greatly reducing management
of the overall storage network edge. SAN24B-6 in Access Gateway mode can connect
servers to NPIV-enabled SAN fabrics.
6
IBM Storage Networking SAN24B-6 Switch
IBM Network Advisor data sheet.