Introducing the IBM SANnav Management Portal and Global View

If you haven’t been told daily that the rate of data growth is accelerating, data centers are expanding beyond their traditional physical boundaries to include multiple cloud-based resources, and new technologies such as AI are driving rapid IT transformation .. now, where have you been?  

The above holds true especially given how fast we have had to accelerate to digital in the last few months. And now more than ever, the focus shifts to the network. Unless networks move more data, faster, it’s mostly all for naught. Multicloud environments can’t exist – unless networks help enable them. And enterprises can’t address growing IT complexity – unless networks themselves grow smarter.

This is the backdrop, and these are the challenges that have driven the development of the IBM b-type Gen7 networking solutions, culminating in network technology dubbed the Autonomous SAN. To manage the Autonomous SAN, we introduce the IBM SANnav portfolio that includes SANnav Management Portal and SANnav Global View. Together, these two products can:

• Simplify configuration, management, monitoring, and troubleshooting of SAN resources.
• Manage multiple switches and network fabrics.
• Provide management of up to 20 instances of the Management Portal.

SANnav offer a wide-ranging toolset to translate information about SAN behavior and performance into actionable insights. These tools allow admins to quickly identify, isolate, and correct problems before they impact the business.

How?

IBM Storage Networking hardware includes integrated network sensors that non-disruptively gather millions of real-time metrics that the SANnav Management Portal uses to identify, monitor, and analyze the overall health and performance of the SAN. This data is then contextualized into dashboards that can be used to quickly detect and isolate problems. At a glance, admins have actionable intelligence on the overall health of their fabric, switches, servers, and storage, which they can view in the form of summary health score circles. Admins can drill down from each dashboard into investigation mode to further examine any relevant data for performance optimization or troubleshooting. They can quickly associate real-time data with historical metrics and logs for in-depth analysis. This can help with spotting trends, establishing baselines, and identifying any behavioral changes over time.

Highlights

SANNav offers a simple browser-based user interface (UI) with a focus on streamlining common workflows such as configuration, zoning, deployment, troubleshooting, and reporting:

• Policy-based configuration management allows users to apply consistent configurations across environments, then view switches that have experienced configuration drifts via a dashboard widget and examine the delta. SANnav zoning configuration is done via a highly simplified and intuitive workflow.
• Dashboards provide at-a-glance views and summary health scores for fabrics, switches, hosts, and targets that may be contributing to performance issues within the network. Users can instantly drill down into any hot spots for investigation and take corrective action.
• Contextual-based topology views allow users to quickly locate an object of interest without sifting through irrelevant information. Visualizing relevant contextual information about a specific device, such as a particular switch, allows users to see all directly connected entities in the data path for that switch, as well as all end-point physical devices directly connected to the switch – making the entire process of detecting, isolating, and troubleshooting more efficient.
• Context search enables users to search by various contexts, such as switches, switch ports, hosts, host ports, VMs, storage, and storage ports.
• Filter management provides users with the ability to sort through large amounts of data by selecting only attributes of importance and reducing the displayed content to only the points of interest, for faster troubleshooting.
• Investigation mode provides intuitive views that users can instantly drill down into for key details to help them understand complex behaviors. The SANnav Management Portal periodically collects metrics and stores them in a historical time series database for further analysis.
• Reporting provides graphical summaries of performance and health information, including all data captured using IBM b-type Fabric Vision technology. Reports can be configured and scheduled directly from the SANnav Management Portal to show only the most relevant data, allowing for prioritizing and optimizing network performance more efficiently.

Today, almost all enterprises have storage infrastructure and multiple cloud resources extending worldwide, making it critical to be able to understand the health of the entire SAN. With IBM SANnav, you can now better manage sprawling storage networks and reduce the impact of IT complexity.

Watch the on-demand webinar on the SANnav portfolio here.