In another sign of the current state of the industry market place, we’ve just seen the announcement of the acquisition of network switch supplier Foundry by SAN switch supplier Brocade Unfortunately, we could not get stock quote BRCD this time.. Whilst some of the blogs around seem to want to portray this is an opportunity for heartburn, I’m not sure that this will be the case, but rather a smart move on the hope that FCoE and iSCSI will be the way of the future, at least in the medium term.
Whilst the synergies of switching fabrics might seem to be a good thing, Cisco Cisco Systems, Inc. 47,10 +0,39 +0,83% still maintains a difference between it’s core network (6500 / Nexus ) and SAN (MDS) lines. No-one else of any particular note appears to be in both marketplaces at the same time..
Whilst the commonality of components at the physical and layer 2 (signaling and data formats) is improving, there is still a substantial difference between packet and block based data and the requirements needed to support this.
iSCSI, FCIP and other protocols are designed to bring the block and packet layers closer together, but as usual IP has a substantial overhead, so we’re also starting to see FCoE standards emerge as well, but the net effect is to build the block layer on top of the packet layers.
Foundry has a good history with it’s BigIron switches, which have traditionally been one of the highest density and scalable switch platforms. Brocade is the market leader in SANs, with over 80% market-share and having had a major head-start (it was founded in 1995), and it has managed to maintain this with some good product extensions and applications (data migration tools, etc).
With the stabilisation of standards (and having more than one), it looks like Brocade could be onto a winner, not only having the core SAN intelligence, but also having the Ethernet connection method to deploy even larger and cheaper disk storage.
I think with the credit crunch, such acquisitions will become more common over the next year.. things that fit quite well together, but maybe not the expected alliances and marriages..
