Brocade HBA
For IT administrators, all of the popular HBAs, whether from Brocade, QLogic, or Emulex, provide a GUI-based management application: Brocade Host Connectivity Manager (HCM), QLogic SANsurfer, and Emulex HBAnyware. Each of these applications has a very similar hierarchy of managed objects. That makes what each application can monitor and manage very similar. The critically important issue then becomes the ease and quickness with which IT administrators manipulate those managed-object hierarchies when performing important SAN maintenance and problem discovery tasks.
At issue is how well these tools empower IT administrators to quickly assess SAN traffic problems, accurately correlate problems with the performance of business applications, and correctly resolve processing disruptions. That's why SAN managers view HBA management within the context of holistic fabric management. How well HBA utilities manage their object hierarchies within a unified fabric context directly impacts productivity of IT administrators.
The importance of the impact that these HBA utilities have on system and storage administrators is underscored by an important IT heuristic: In the first year of operation, operating costs associated with managing storage hardware are often greater than the capital costs of acquiring that hardware. While many think of FC HBAs as commodity items, differences in the design and behavior of these HBA utilities will impact workflow and productivity for IT administrators.
To support business processes, IT must be able to quickly diagnose and resolve infrastructure events and issues that involve interdependencies among storage devices, hosts, and SAN switches. To simplify SAN connectivity, Brocade's Data Center Fabric (DCF) architecture provides an end-to-end strategic framework that strives to logically unify SAN HBAs, switches, and directors. The key component of DCF architecture, Brocade Data Center Fabric Manager (DCFM) Enterprise is the primary tool used by many SAN managers to assess data center fabrics-from storage ports to HBAs attached to either physical or virtual servers. DCFM's unified perspective provides IT administrators a significant advantage in maintaining, optimizing, and auditing a SAN fabric.
That unified perspective is all the more important given the explosive growth in the adoption of Virtual Operating Environments (VOEs). The limitations of software I/O profiles and the practice of isolating critical applications on dedicated servers left SAN fabrics with multiple servers for every storage device. Dubbed the fan-out ratio, with a high number of servers to storage devices, throughput at storage devices became a key bottleneck metric. Consolidation via server virtualization, however, radically changes that SAN topology.
With VOE servers hosting 8 or more virtual machines (VMs), an HBA in a VOE server can no longer be regarded as a simple commodity product. As the number of virtual servers sharing the physical FC HBA ports of a VOE server increase, SAN fan-out is no longer just a switch issue: SAN fan-out becomes a server HBA issue as well.
By extending the DCFM SAN management tool to HCM, the Brocade management tool for HBAs, Brocade also extends a well-established fabric management paradigm to the host side. As a result, IT administrators can apply Brocade's unique Quality of Service (QoS) Traffic Prioritization, which comes entirely out of the fabric, to each VM. Through unified host- and fabric-based Adaptive Networking services, Brocade HBAs provide support for policy-based data management and application service levels.
