Brocade wants to be the first vendor network managers think of as an alternative to Cisco. In a story provocatively headlined "Brocade gearing up to fight 'Cisco fatigue'", the IDG News Service writes that executives at the storage company's analyst conference this week boasted that Brocade would be the only other company that can offer connectivity on both sides of servers, to the LAN and the storage network. Brocade also said it is better able than Cisco to cooperate with key system vendors such as IBM, HP and EMC because of its longtime relationship with those companies - an important distinction as Cisco appears to be making moves to compete directly with such players. "There's a sense here that there hasn't been a credible alternative to Cisco," said Ian Whiting, vice president and general manager of Brocade's Data Center Infrastructure division.

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