Brocade Communications Systems, Inc and HP, two of the world`s leading providers of infrastructure and enterprise storage solutions for storage area networks (SANs), have announced an expansion of their global alliance to simplify the management of heterogeneous SAN environments.
The companies are working together to enable HP OpenView Storage Area Manager customers to easily manage Brocade switches across multiple fabrics for common tasks like configuration management, firmware download, licence management, sequenced reboot, end-to-end performance monitoring, real-time health monitoring and zone management. In addition, a separate announcement between Brocade and Emulex allows HP OpenView Storage Area Manager to access information from multiple host bus adapters (HBAs) without requiring a software agent on each server.
"Simplifying the management of heterogeneous storage infrastructures has long been a goal of end users. As SAN infrastructures have continued to evolve, the capability to manage all storage resources from a single console has become increasingly important as customers try to maximise staff productivity and streamline operational procedures," said Sean Derrington, Senior Program Director, Meta Group. "This announcement demonstrates HP and Brocade`s continued commitment to provide their mutual customers advanced technology solutions that reduce management complexity and improve operational efficiency."
"The HP OpenView Storage Area Manager solution, combined with the intelligence delivered by the Brocade SAN infrastructure, will allow our mutual customers to grow their SANs while simplifying the SAN management process," said Jeffrey Brooks, Brocade Chief Marketing Officer. "In addition, by leveraging Brocade`s API, HP applications can gather management functionality from the HBAs through the fabric, greatly simplifying their development cycle. HP has established itself as a leader in managing heterogeneous SANs with OpenView Storage Area Manager, and we will continue working together to deliver solutions that simplify management for our customers."
In addition, a standards-based development announced separately between Brocade and Emulex will extend the intelligence in the SAN fabric to enable end-to-end SAN fabric manageability for both the switching infrastructure and HBAs as one SAN fabric through HP OpenView Storage Area Manager. Because this integration aggregates the elements of the fabric and reduces the need for agents, it will simplify time-consuming management tasks, such as HBA firmware distribution.
"As SANs increase in size and complexity, simplified fabric and storage management becomes a more critical concern for customers. Through the collaboration with Brocade, HP OpenView Storage Area Manager, already a leading solution for managing mixed-vendor environments, further expands its capabilities," said Bob Schultz, Vice-President of Worldwide Marketing, HP Network Storage Solutions. "HP OpenView Storage Area Manager customers can manage 90 percent of the installed enterprise storage systems and now the vast majority of installed Fibre Channel switches with a unified tool, increasing their operating effectiveness and efficiency."
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