Next Generation of Brocade Network Monitoring Service

Brocade announced the next-generation Brocade Network Monitoring Service (NMS), which provides organizations with an end-to-end remote monitoring, alerting, and reporting service for their data center fabrics. Brocade NMS now provides 24×7 expert end-to-end monitoring about the health and status of data center fabrics to help maximize network efficiency, availability, and uptime. Moreover, Brocade NMS provides organizations with valuable information and rules-based business intelligence to maximize application availability and optimize data center resources. Through this service, IT organizations can better manage growing and increasingly complex data center infrastructures with their current staff.

"Managed services are one of the fastest-growing segments of the storage services market," said Gartner Storage Services Principal Analyst Adam Couture. "Gartner anticipates that in a weakened economy this should accelerate as IT departments are asked to do more with less and may have headcounts frozen or even reduced."

According to Gartner’s 2008 CIO survey, business intelligence is a top technology priority. Brocade NMS helps fulfill that need by providing deeper business intelligence, enabling organizations to make faster and more-informed decisions. Brocade NMS does this by integrating expertise from knowledgeable storage and networking professionals with a comprehensive monitoring approach, advanced event management, and predictive diagnostic techniques. This integration can help reduce overall problem resolution time by almost one hour per event, resulting in decreased downtime costs and increased productivity to subscribers.

In addition to 24×7 monitoring, Brocade NMS collects and analyzes a wide variety of performance, utilization, and throughput data. Real-time alerts warn administrators of networking issues, bottlenecks, or potential system outages, thereby enabling proactive action to minimize or avoid an impact to application performance and availability. Real-time and historical data and flexible reports are generated automatically and are available via a secure Web portal. As a result, organizations can analyze historical trends, optimize resource utilization and cost-effectively plan future capacity.

New features of Brocade NMS include:

• Expanded monitoring and reporting from extension devices into the data center across all Brocade products and many third-party products, creating an end-to-end view of the data center fabric.
• A flexible new architecture that enables policy-based monitoring, event correlation, and ‘yellow light’ alerts to increase business intelligence and enable a more proactive approach.
• An infrastructure that provides faster, more reliable access, as well as enhanced security. An enhanced reporting platform provides real-time and historical performance information along with flexible, customizable reports and data views to meet specific requirements.
• More precise fault determination across the data center fabric for faster resolution and increased ability to meet application SLAs.

"The newly enhanced Brocade NMS helps customers get the most value from their data center network investments and ensures that under-staffed IT resources can focus on the business," said Hugues Meyrath, Vice President and General Manager of Brocade Global Services. "Through constant monitoring and reporting, Brocade NMS helps ensure that our customers’ data center networks are running optimally and that applications and data are readily available to users."