In the movie National Treasure, Nicolas Cage finds a pair of “spectacles” with three colored lenses that enable him to read the treasure map to the long- lost treasure. This is an apt description of what Emulex’s new OneCommand™ Vision software enables you to do. OneCommand Vision is the only tool in the industry for Fibre Channel and Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) networks that lets you see not only the full data path, but the data traffic flow. This is vital for quickly solving problems and maximizing server performance and availability.

Why is this important to IT managers? Because no one team owns the whole application infrastructure. We often hear customers of IT applications say that they “see” applications begin to slow down over time; the applications manager says things are fine, the networking specialist says things are fine and the storage specialist says things are fine, but in the aggregate, the final result is not what the service level agreement (SLA) should be. This creates a number of challenges for IT managers.

This is where OneCommand Vision can change the hunt for the treasured answer and enable IT managers to see the problem in a new way and find new solutions in record time. It enables IT managers to see into their I/O treasure trove in three new ways:

See the I/O Problem – OneCommand Vision is unique in the market in that it can provide a complete end-to-end visual log of not only the data path, but also the traffic. Unless you can see the traffic flow and bottlenecks, you cannot make changes to solve the traffic jam. OneCommand Vision allows IT managers to see conflicts coming from each server or virtual server. We have all heard the expression, “a picture is worth a thousand words,” but in this case, being able to see the I/O traffic ebb and flow will save a thousand hours of administrative time over the years. OneCommand Vision’s ability to let IT managers see both Fibre Channel and FCoE networking helps them deliver on their SLAs and high availability goals at a lower cost per system.

Solve the I/O Problem – OneCommand Vision does more than monitor and display what is going on in the I/O data path. It tells you where the problem is, when it happens and what dynamics in the I/O path are causing the issue become a problem. Constant problems are typically easy to see and diagnose. It is the subtle or occasional problem that is most difficult to find and diagnose. With OneCommand Vision, IT managers can help IT departments rapidly remove these I/O obstacles from the data path to make IT more efficient.

Set the Right Configuration – OneCommand Vision’s I/O Analyzer helps you set the right configuration for each server or virtual server and manage the “I/O Blender” problem common in today’s sprawling virtual environments. OneCommand Vision helps pinpoint where the bottlenecks are and how to overcome them in the server, network or storage configurations. OneCommand Vision changes the I/O game from one of knowing the right answer vs. searching for it and making experimental changes.

In one example, we found that in a 1000 server environment with Fibre Channel connectivity, we were able to save over $3 million per year with savings related to improved efficiency (capital, staffing, uptime, power and cooling). The goals of OneCommand Vision are:

• Improve operational expense (OPEX)—Shorten time to resolution
  • Insight into overall I/O performance health across the
    data center
  • Proactively address I/O over-subscription in the environment
• Improve physical to virtual efforts — Higher confidence in performance assessment
  • Intelligently size infrastructure, relative to I/O resources, facilitating data center consolidation and physical-to-virtual efforts
• Improve capital expense (CAPEX)— Better utilization of existing IT assets
  • Better manage dynamic workloads by adding knowledge about critical I/O resources
  • Intelligently size infrastructure, relative to I/O resources, facilitating data center consolidation and physical-to-virtual efforts
• Maximum infrastructure utilization by identifying underutilized I/O paths and devices
  • Improve customer satisfaction—Meet SLA commitments
  • Proactively managing key I/O performance variables, and quickly resolving complex data center availability issues

As in National Treasure, the key is being able to find and unravel the clues that the server, networks and storage provide to IT managers. OCV enables IT mangers to see the problem, solve the problem and set the right configuration to improve OPEX, CAPEX and SLAs.

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