As someone that implements Brocades SANs on a semi-regular basis, I thought I’d stop by their stand and see if they had anything interesting on show and it turns out they did.
The project I am currently working on has a number of Brocade fabrics (4) after adding 3 new ones and managing them would have been a pain if not for Data Center Fabric Manger. However, there is one massive limitation with DCFM and that’s the free version only manages a single fabric. ‘What do you expect for free?’ I hear you cry, well I expect the jump up from the free version to be a bit more incremental than it currently is. If you want to upgrade you can, to the Enterprise, which will cost you a substantial £30k list. Now this is not bad if you push Enterprise to its limits (1000 ports in a single fabric), but what if you only have 200 ports? well Brocade have obviously noticed this discrepency and are releasing a middle level version and are hoping to release in the next few months.
Something else of interest was the vCenter plugin that connects directly with Data Centere Fabric Manager and can trigger actions within vCenter based on policies set at the fabric level. If an HBA’s bandwidth becomes saturated, a policy can send an alert to vCenter to move it to a host with greater HBA bandwidth availability.
All very neat stuff and the demo worked, so check it out if you deal with Brocade kit.
