HP DCFM software is a server based network management applications that enable end-to-end management of B-series Storage Area Network (SAN) fabrics. HP DCFM Enterprise and Professional+ manage and secure the flow of data across multiple fabrics. They provide a holistic view of SAN Fabrics whether local to the data center or geographically dispersed. With policy based management HP DCFM Enterprise and Professional+ enable IT organizations to meet their Service Level Agreements (SLAs). HP DCFM Enterprise and Professional+ provides multi-protocol networking support for:

• Fibre Channel
• Fibre Channel over IP
• Fibre Channel Routing
• iSCSI

Both DCFM Enterprise and Professional+ seamlessly manage multiple data center fabrics to help optimize performance and maximize the availability of data and networked resources. They do so by utilizing industry-leading capabilities for monitoring, troubleshooting, diagnostics, and proactive event notification. In addition, both products feature easy-to-use administration tools that streamline or automate repetitive tasks so organizations can achieve unprecedented levels of productivity and efficiency.

Organizations must maximize the utilization of their infrastructure resources. With unique asset tracking and reporting capabilities, DCFM Enterprise and Professional+ provide detailed visibility into performance utilization of hardware and network bandwidth. HP DCFM Enterprise and Professional+ maximizes the ROI of hardware purchases by better utilizing existing infrastructure resources and identifying new network requirements.

Today, only HP StorageWorks DCFM Enterprise provides a non-disruptive path and functional continuity for organizations that are upgrading from Fabric Manager. Both DCFM Enterprise and Professional+, however, provide comprehensive management of both B-series FOS based fabrics as well as fabrics in interop mode with M-series M-EOS and FOS based fabrics.

Organizations that need to manage smaller SAN environments can utilize B-series Data Center Fabric Manager Professional, a server based application included with B-series switches that contains a subset of Data Center Fabric Manager Enterprise features. Data Center Fabric Manager Professional enables the centralized management of up to 1,000 ports in a single fabric, performing key functions (such as firmware downloads and configurations) for groups of switches while accessing device-level information.

There are now two advanced management versions of HP Data Center Fabric Manager software:

• HP DCFM Enterprise that provides a view of up to 24 SAN Fabrics and 9,000 switch ports.
  
• HP DCFM Professional+ that provides a view of up to 4 SAN Fabrics and 2,560 switch ports
  HP DCFM Professional will continue to be offered which can manage up to 1,000 switch ports in a single fabric.

• Centralizes management of B-series fabrics within and across data centers, including those with different protocols
• Supports server virtualization, including visualizing and setting QoS levels for applications running on virtual machines
• Reduces expenses and maximizes productivity by automating tasks and providing easy-to-use, wizard-driven operations
• Administers SLAs via industry-leading monitoring, troubleshooting, diagnostics, and event notification capabilities
• Secures data flow from applications to storage across data center fabrics by managing user access controls and ensuring consistent security settings
  
• Delivers real-time and historical performance monitoring to enable proactive problem diagnosis, maximize resource utilization, and facilitate capacity planning
  
• Integrates seamlessly with leading third-party automation solutions to provide a holistic approach to data center management

• B-Series DC SAN Director management with features such as Quality of Service (QoS) and end to end performance monitoring. HP DCFM Professional+ does not support management of the B-Series DC SAN Backbone Director.
• Unprecedented scalability HP DCFM Enterprise supports up to 24 physical SAN fabrics, 9,000 switch ports, and 20,000 end devices while HP DCFM Pro+ supports up to 4 physical SAN fabrics, 2560 switch ports, and 4096 end devices.
• An overarching view of fabric health with at-a-glance views of switch and Inter-Switch Link (ISL) health status, including a connectivity map for status per device, performance utilization rate per ISL, and visualization of end devices.
• Performance monitoring proactively addresses issues with both real-time and historical performance data collection, monitoring, and graphical displays (across Fibre Channel, FCIP, and Fibre Channel Routing ports and connections).
• Fault management helps manage events and failures in the data center by configuring rule-based events. You can define triggers that prompt user actions.
• Troubleshooting and diagnostics streamline problem resolution.
• Advanced Call Home enables automatic calls into HP Service Centers when specified triggering conditions are met. Advanced Call Home defines how HP DCFM Enterprise and DCFM Pro+ should respond to certain events, including automatically capturing diagnostic information from the switches.
• Extensive zoning capabilities support analysis of the impact of zoning changes offline without affecting the production fabric.
• Configuration management enables automated backup of critical configurations across data centers and promotes configuration consistency across the fabric.
• Security management allows multiple levels of user access and views with flexible definitions of administrator responsibilities; helps maintain consistent security settings across multiple switches by leveraging the Security Replication Wizard; and manages the configuration, and settings.
• HP DCFM Enterprise Also Adds: FICON and cascaded FICON environment configuration and management provides powerful analysis and diagnostic capabilities, as well as SAN-level RNID data display, Port Connectivity Dialog, FICON Emulation support, and Multi-PDCM matrix display. HP DCFM Professional+ does not support management of FICON configurations.
  
• Full B-Series DC SAN Backbone Director management with features such as Quality of Service (QoS) and end to end performance monitoring including management of the B-Series DC SAN Backbone.
  

HP StorageWorks Data Center Fabric Manager Enterprise and Professional+ are highly scalable, Java-based applications that manages multiple B-Series switches and fabrics in real-time. In particular, Data Center Fabric Manager provides the essential functions for efficiently configuring, monitoring, dynamically provisioning, and managing SAN fabrics on a daily basis.

Through its single-point SAN management platform, Data Center Fabric Manager enables the global integration and execution of processes across multiple fabrics. Moreover, Data Center Fabric Manager helps to lower the cost of SAN ownership by intuitively facilitating a variety of SAN management tasks. As a result, Data Center Fabric Manager provides a flexible and powerful tool optimized to provide organizations with rapid access to critical SAN information across multiple fabrics. This latest indention, introduces full support for the B-series router/extension products for easy deployment of this new technology.

HP StorageWorks Data Center Fabric Manager software simplifies infrastructure management with the performance and scalability required for Next Generation Data Centers that connects applications to infrastructure in the majority of the world's data centers. With Data Center Fabric Manager Enterprise and Professional+, B-Series products, whether based on the Fabric Operating System (FOS) or the M-EOS and FOS in interop mode, can be managed with less cost and complexity. Data Center Fabric Manager delivers compelling increases in scalability and performance, which are essential as infrastructure management extends its scope from individual switches and directors to an end-to-end virtual data center with its pools of physical servers and storage connected by policy-based services to the converged, multi-protocol Data Center Fabric. As the HP StorageWorks DC SAN Backbone Director expanded fabric size and performance while adding new "plug-in" fabric services such as adaptive networking, so too does SAN management evolve from the switch and director management architecture of earlier products to the policy-based, fabric service management architecture of Data Center Fabric Manager.

HP StorageWorks Data Center Fabric Manager Professional is a management application available at no-charge and comes with B-series SAN Switches and:

• Allows management of a single Fabric OS (FOS) fabric (up to a 1,000 switch ports) at a time
• Performs group switch management beyond the scope of Web Tools
• Does not offer management of the DC SAN Backbone Director or FICON
  
• Manages B-Series SAN Switches (M-Series switches require DCFM Enterprise or Professional+)

It is targeted for SMB customers that use FOS based SAN fabrics and require a management solution for smaller SANs based on a single fabric.

SMB customers that initially start off with Data Center Fabric Manager Professional and have a small SAN environment may over time feel the need for expansion to a mid-range class product (Data Center Fabric Manager Professional+) or an enterprise-class product (Data Center Fabric Manager Enterprise) as their environments start to grow in size and complexity, and as they start to uptake more enterprise-class functionality (such as Fibre Channel Routing, FCIP, etc.). A non-disruptive upgrade path is available from Data Center Fabric Manager Professional to Data Center Fabric Manager Enterprise or Professional+

HP DCFM Enterprise delivers unprecedented scalability, up to 24 fabrics and 9,000 switch ports, while HP DCFM Professional+ scales to 4 SAN Fabrics and 2560 switch ports.

Both offerings provide brand-new features including Adaptive Networking features for quality of service, ingress rate limiting and traffic isolation zones.

While DCFM provides increased functionality, not all features available in FM or HAFM are available in DCFM Enterprise and Professional+, and some functions may operate differently. Please refer to the Migration and Transition guide for additional information.

HP StorageWorks DCFM Enterprise and Professional+ enable IT organizations to monitor fabrics on a real-time and on a historical basis. Both offerings of DCFM use a policy-driven approach to set thresholds for both individual ports and end to end between source (application) and target (disk). This allows users to address performance issues proactively, rapidly diagnose the underlying causes, and quickly resolve them before the SAN becomes the bottleneck for critical applications. Furthermore, IT organizations can use analytical and reporting features to study performance trends over time and make changes to maximize asset utilization and plan for future capacity needs.

Some performance monitoring and management capabilities are listed below:

• Real-time performance data collection, monitoring, and graphical display (across FC, FCIP, and Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) ports and connections)
• Historical performance data collection, monitoring, and graphical displays (across FC, FCIP, and Fibre Channel Routing ports and connections)
• End-to-end monitors (both real time and historical) from source (application) to target (disk)
• Policy-based, user-defined performance thresholds
• Color-coded "marching ants" on the topology to show traffic status

HP DCFM enables configuration of QoS priorities using special zones and zoning-a paradigm that is very familiar to SAN administrators. Setting a QoS priority for an application, whether it is running on a physical or virtual server, is a simple choice from a right-click menu.

HP DCFM allow LSAN zones to be created, edited, and activated in the fabric zoning scope for both backbone and edge fabrics. The HP DCFM topology supports comprehensive Meta SAN features, which include visualization of the backbone and edge fabrics and display of Inter-Fabric Links (IFLs) in the topology.

HP StorageWorks Data Center Fabric Manager Enterprise is support on the following Operating Systems:

• Microsoft Windows 2003 Server, XP Professional, Vista Business Edition, and 2008 Server
• Linux Red Hat AS 4.0, Enterprise Linux 5 Advanced, SuSE Linux ES10
• Sun Solaris 10

HP DCFM Enterprise and Professional+ must be installed on a dedicated server that meets the minimum requirements specified in the DCFM User Manual.

Software support benefits include:

• Improved productivity of system managers and operators
  
• Improved system performance and reduced downtime due to software defects
  
• Expedited problem resolution through expert-level technical resources
  
• Software and documentation updates
  
• Electronic access to essential product and support information

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The information contained herein is subject to change without notice.

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