No more blind SAN's bluff - storage mangement

Abstract

Storage area networks (SANs) provide a critical information infrastructure that can bring cost savings within large data centres. But SANs have now become as complex as the networks and organisations they support. A variety of requirements have made it even more pressing for network administrators to monitor what is actually taking place deep inside the SAN fabric. There are needs to: sustain higher data rates; manage growing capacity; support multiple protocols in the same chassis; interoperate across a heterogeneous collection of equipment from a variety of vendors; accurately decode traffic obscured through encapsulation and and virtualisation technologies; and provide tiered storage implementations that reflect the value and priority of an organisation's data and applications.