Simplified SAN Management

Simplified SAN Management

SAN Management refers to activities undertaken by IT Managers and Administrators to provision their storage infrastructure while also ensuring availability, reliability, recoverability and optimal performance.

For companies requiring large SANs, the need to simplify the management of networks has become critical. Managing multiple SAN islands with many points of management can become extremely complex. Additionally, as enterprise SANs grow, end-users are also increasingly cautious about the lack of effective troubleshooting tools for storage networks. Many users have not had the confidence to build large SANs - partly due to lack of troubleshooting tools and the complexity caused by the need to manage many ISLs across multiple SAN islands.

Today, large enterprise end-users require management tools that are centralized, easy to use, that provide significant troubleshooting capabilities that help to resolve potential problems very quickly, and that are standards-based in effort to integrate seamlessly with other management tools. Today’s users are also looking for more in their management tools as they make new choices for growing their enterprise SANs, using differing protocols to create efficient business continuance solutions, and cost-effective solutions built to withstand SAN changes.

Storage networking solutions incorporating Cisco Fabric Manager, integrated into every MDS 9000 SAN Switch, deliver a centralized, secure point of management with industry-leading troubleshooting and monitoring tools that help large enterprise users to scale. Along with the intelligent networking features built into the MDS 9000 family, end-users can easily consolidate multiple SAN islands, build SAN Extension solutions for business continuance, and lower costs by moving Intelligent Fabric Applications into the network for efficient resource provisioning and utilization.