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Improve your data center management experience with HPE Network Orchestrator

 

Are your data centers under pressure to deliver greater performance, agility, and operational efficiency to address data growth and dynamic business demands? HPE Network Orchestrator modernizes the storage network, helping you increase productivity and scale, while improving storage investment efficiency.

HPE Smart Fabric Orchestrator_data center mangement_blog.jpgWe at HPE have long been committed to providing exceptional experiences for our customers through end-to-end solutions with comprehensive compute, network, and storage products. Aligned with that commitment, HPE Network Orchestrator (NetO) was developed to accelerate the process of configuring, monitoring, and managing different types of SAN fabrics in different configurations—all through a single dashboard. In addition, features include healing, fabric interoperability, naming zones, and predefined templates to simplify configuration of switches, ports, fabrics, and containers. What's more, HPE NetO provides a Single Point of Connectivity Knowledge (SPOCK) validation for SAN that automates the error-prone step for validation of updated or new devices.

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Figure 1: HPE Network Orchestrator improves your data center management experience with innovative tools for data center automation and orchestration.

In the networking space, managing and incorporating changes to a network can be challenging because most networks are made up of different types of devices from potentially different vendors. Different governing protocols add to the complexity and need for support. Some devices are accompanied by software to manage them, but there are no valid approaches for end-to-end compute to storage network testing and validation. The architecture of enterprise infrastructure has created networks, which don’t easily connect, and as a result, enterprise IT professionals spend a lot of time planning and performing upgrades or migrations. Even after careful planning, such upgrades can take weeks or months to be completed while ensuring minimum downtime or data disruption. Human errors have become one of the leading causes of downtime, which can be prevented.

HPE Network Orchestrator (NetO) tackles these issues and lets users see the end-to-end topology on a port-by-port basis with the provision of the automatic SPOCK validation that is also capable of pre-upgrade check, eliminating the chances of human error during an upgrade or adding a device. Assisting in end-to-end visualization allows addition and deletion of device managers on a single screen. Streamlining the network orchestration process further via templates by HPE NetO simplifies the creation of configurations with similar or identical properties. All these features can be accessed by simply installing this software-based solution on the server side.

How does your business benefit from HPE NetO?

By minimizing the amount of time for diagnostics, monitoring, and orchestration of your storage network,with fine-grain visibility, HPE NetO provides increased SAN resiliency. Not to forget, the HPE NetO smart portal offers an enhanced experience. HPE NetO optimizes the use of existing storage infrastructure of the enterprise. It can cut operating costs by decreasing the downtime of the network with efficient upgrade using automatic SPOCK validation.HPE Smart Fabric Orchestrator features.jpg

Figure 2:  HPE Network Orchestrator key dashboard features for data center automation and orchestration

The HPE NetO dashboard lets you visualize the key performance indicators and other strategic data for your storage network at a glance. An amalgamation of movable panels—with each panel summarizing an important data point—provides fine-grain visibility into storage fabrics (both Fibre Channel and Ethernet). The Notifications Ticker option enhances the experience of keeping track of important and critical tasks, at all times, by providing a context-sensitive pane available throughout the HPE Network Orchestrator.

HPE Network Orchestrator features at a glance

  • Template-based deployment—Templates let you create custom blueprints defining various protocols that can be enabled on a switch, port, or fabric by a click of a button than a series of commands for each element’s configuration, thus reducing chances of misconfigurations and saving time.
  • Fabric reports—HPE NetO reports can be generated by the user either to check the status of template application or to identify any complaint element existing in the topology.
  • Interop validation with HPE SPOCK—HPE NetO validates the integrity, interoperability, and compliance of HPE storage, servers, and network fabric infrastructure before or during deployment, eliminating the need for human errors during any configuration update or adding new devices.
  • Fabric Topology—Visualize managed elements of the fabric end-to-end HPE Network Orchestrator allows the administrator to understand what devices are connected end-to-end and view fabric visibility while launching a sequence of steps to create the topology view of the managed elements.
  • End-to-end monitoring with self-healing capabilities:—HPE NetO monitors activities and generates an event for action, auditing, and reporting. Administrators can monitor various parameters end to end to make informed decisions based on alerts with other fabric services to remedy a situation delivering an easy way for administrators to be altered about storage networking issues. It builds on the basic diagnostic-ready fabric capabilities with advanced diagnostic assessment to monitor and quickly identify states of physical ports for root cause analysis, failure impact assessment, and self-healing for improved performance.

Good news for your multivendor storage network

HPE Network Orchestrator supports your preference for your multivendor storage network environment while ensuring availability and business continuity. It decreases the time taken and errors made during the orchestration process, without enormously impacting the orchestration expenses, ensuring high return on investment in HPE NetO. It lets you build on the basic diagnostic-ready fabric capabilities with advanced diagnostic assessment to monitor and quickly identify states of physical ports for root cause analysis, failure impact assessment, and self-healing for improved performance. By minimizing the amount of time for diagnostics, monitoring, and orchestration of a storage network, with fine-grain visibility, HPE NetO would ensure increased SAN resiliency.


Faisal Hanif HPE Storage.jpegMeet Aound the Storage Block blogger Faisal Hanif, Product Management, HPE Storage and Big Data. Faisal is part of HPE’s Storage & Big Data business group leading Product Management & Marketing for next generation products and solutions for storage connectivity, network automation & orchestration. Follow Faisal on Twitter @ffhanif 

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