Master the Details with SAN Switch Monitoring

Visual Storage Intelligence® collects and reports data from all Brocade and Cisco SAN switches. To see what other devices we are compatible with, visit this page.

It certainly can be. In enterprise environments, it’s common to work with as many as 20,000 ports (or more). Besides monitoring them all for errors and misconfigurations, it’s important to be able to easily identify what hosts and zones they are mapped to and which ports are unlicensed.

There are not many tools available for this kind of analysis, and as a result many enterprises use SANnav to monitor their SAN environment. However, SANnav can be expensive and complicated – especially for small-to-medium sized environments.

Visual Storage Intelligence offers a less expensive, easier-to-use, and more platform-comprehensive option for switch analytics.

SANnav is an ideal tool for setting up large quantities of new SAN switches, defining custom switch policies, and deploying architecture templates across multiple switch environments. However, this niche doesn’t apply to most infrastructures.

Visual Storage Intelligence includes robust switch reporting that:

1. is simpler to use
2. correlates seamlessly with your entire infrastructure
3. optimizes your asset ROI
4. promotes operational continuity

Unlike SANnav, Visual Storage Intelligence offers automatic host connection listings, global topology, switch capacity planning, EOL / EOM calendar and continued support, ServiceNow integrations, and more.

Visual Storage Intelligence’s data collection is as simple as entering a switch name and authentication to complete reporting setup. No required software maintenance, firmware prerequisites, latency requirements, additional license charges, custom configurations, or overall complexity.

For a full technical overview of Visual Storage Intelligence’s SAN functionality (compared with SANnav’s functionality), click here.

Our single-pane-of-glass data displays make it easy for clients to analyze hosts and the ports they are mapped with together. That way, when a host encounters an issue, clients quickly rule out (or identify) a switch-level root cause.

In addition, performance trending and capacity planning help clients monitor usage and ensure they always have enough licensed ports available for their future projects – avoiding last-minute license purchases and budget changes.

Moreover, Visual Storage Intelligence® provides extensive reporting, modeling, monitoring, and optimizing for nearly all storage environments including SAN storage. Learn more here.

We report on multiple SAN switch data points, including:

• Port availability
• Port speeds
• Port speed maximums
• Licensed / unlicensed ports
• Unused ports
• Firmware versions
• Performance trends
• Utilization trends
• Utilization forecasting
• Alerts / offline ports
• Errors over time
• Errors by port
• Zoning
• Host connections

For a full technical overview of Visual Storage Intelligence’s SAN functionality (compared with SANnav’s functionality), click here.

Yes! With a standard subscription you have full, 24/7 data collection and reporting on everything in your cloud / compute / on-prem environment – including all of our SAN switch visibility and insights. Plus, you can try us out free for 30 days.