Brocade Buys Foundry ? No Great Loss. Storage Switches Ahoy!
22 July, 2008 by Greg Ferro Print Posting
Following my post a couple of days ago about Buying Brocade switches it seems that Brocade isn’t going to make their own, they just bought something off the shelf. To be fair, I don’t know much about Brocade, but I know I am not the biggest fan of Foundry equipment. Foundry is an OK product, but they have managed to disappoint me on tech support and product features on several occasions. So I think its great that a second rate Ethernet company will disappear because, no doubt about it, Brocade will turn all their products into Storage switches in double quick time.
On the same logic, data networking people are going to move away from Foundry pronto. Storage people don’t want their networks mixing with data networks, and vice versa.
The good news is that this will give market space to Juniper switches who are far more likely to make a decent go of it. Which might make Cisco actually start to do some serious work.
Interesting that you say that “storage people don’t want thier networks mixing with data networks, and vice versa” when the Nexus 7000 and 5000 from Cisco indicates disagreement
Cisco wants us to, and we want to, but not many storage / server people saying that they will. Many folks are saying they will not mix storage and data in the data centre and thus will build separate FCoE networks.
You will have to dig a bit, but here is a possibly representative sample:
http://episteme.arstechnica.com/eve/forums/a/frm/f/833003030931.