IBM Announces IBM SANnav


IBM Announced IBM SANnav today.  You can register for a webinar to learn more about SANnav here.    

SANnav is a next-generation SAN management application.  It was built from the ground up with a simple, browser-based user interface.   It can streamline common workflows, such as configuration, zoning, deployment, troubleshooting, and reporting. The modernized GUI can improve operational efficiency by enablog enhanced monitoring capabilities, faster troubleshooting, and advanced analytics. 

Key features and capabilities include:

  1. Configuration management: You can use policy-based management to apply consistent configurations across the switches in your fabrics.  SANnav also makes zoning devices easier by providing a more intuitive interface than previous management products.  
  2. Dashboards:  You can see  at-a-glance views and summary health scores for fabrics, switches, hosts, and targets that may be contributing to performance issues within the network. You can instantly navigate to any hot spots for investigation and take corrective action. 
  3. Filter management: You can sort through large amounts of data by selecting only attributes of importance. For example, users can search for all 32 Gbps ports that are offline. This filter reduces the displayed content to only the points of interest, allowing faster identification and troubleshooting.
  4. Investigation mode: Provides intuitive views that you can navigate for key details to help them understand complex behaviors. SANnav Management Portal periodically collects metrics and stores them in a historical time-series database for further analysis. In addition, it can collect metrics more frequently (at 10-second intervals) for select ports.  This performance data is invaluable when trying to troubleshoot a problem that occurs intermittently and/or is severe enough to impact production but not severe enough to cause a complete outage.
  5. Reporting: Generates customized reports that provide graphical summaries of performance and health information, including all data captured using IBM b-type Fabric Vision technology. Reports can be configured and scheduled directly from SANnav Management Portal to show only the most relevant data, enabling administrators to more efficiently prioritize their actions and optimize network performance
  6. Autonomous SAN:    This is the feature I am most looking forward to learning more about.  As I am in the business of troubleshooting fabrics to find problems I would like to see how effective this is an how quickly the switches can detect problems and notify administrators.  Perhaps some day we'll have switches that can detect problems and automatically route traffic onto faster links (where possible).  This would be very similar to a recent drive I took where my phone's GPS program routed me around a major traffic jam.  It was slower than the main roads assuming no traffic, but was many minutes faster than driving through the congestion. 
As a reminder, you can register for the free webinar at the link above.  I hope to see you there. 

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