SAN Health is a family of SAN diagnostic tools offered to Brocade customers and partners. To use the tools, customers need to register on the Brocade Connect or Brocade Partner Web sites; vendor sponsored resource sites for Brocade SAN users, storage managers, and partners.

At the core of SAN Health is the SAN Health Diagnostics Capture tool, which automatically scans/captures information about SAN fabrics, directors, switches, and connected devices in the storage environment. SAN Health Diagnostics Capture runs from any Windows (95+) PC with TCP/IP connections to the SAN. The captured information is stored in an encrypted audit file, which the user can then upload or E-mail to Brocade. Brocade, in turn, then generates target reports--that are made available to the user through their Brocade Connect or Brocade Partner accounts--in approximately one hour. Said reports are served in Excel and Visio formats, and provide information such as snapshot views of inventory, configurations, historical performance, and graphical topology diagrams.

Also free as part of the SAN Health suite is the SAN Health Professional framework (Windows 2000+), which provides the ability to extend the SAN Health capabilities with features facilitating the searching, analysis, and comparison of data captured by the Diagnostics Capture utility. The SAN Health Professional framework allows customers to search and filter their SAN Health results; including broad searches such as a single search string or specific searches based on any combination of attribute names, devices, ports, switches, fabrics, aliases, zones, and configurations; and filtering tools allowing for the removal of results with blank or specified values.

Beyond these free tools, Brocade also offers fee-based tools and services that leverage and supplement the data and reports generated by the Capture tool. The San Health Professional Change Analysis module highlights the changes that occurred to SAN components between two SAN Health data captures; while the SAN Health Expert service provides subscribers with four quarterly telephone consultations (four 1-hour instances) with a Brocade SAN expert. The SAN expert utilizes the customer's SAN Health reports as part of their consultation.

New features in the latest SAN Health release include full support for mainframe FICON and McDATA SAN environments; as well as the ability to audit switches managed by Brocade EFCM and enhanced topology diagram layouts.

The SAN Health Diagnostics Capture tool is free, as is the SAN Health Professional Framework. The SAN Health Change Analysis module is priced at $1,799/year; while the SAN Health Expert service is priced at $2,396/year (four consultations).

Contact Brocade for further information.