Appears to take issue with Juniper's claim that Foundry switches will be relegated to campus, workgroup
One aspect of the OEM deals IBM made this week that we inadvertently ignored — and Brocade reminded us of — is that Big Blue will now resell Brocade’s FCoE switch and Converged Network Adapters. These products are available immediately from IBM, and they expand on the 10+ years long FibreChannel relationship between the companies and the recent deal for IBM to OEM Brocade’s Foundry switches.
Now, about those switches… IBM and Juniper this week struck an OEM deal for IBM to resell Juniper switches into data center environments. This arrangement comes months after IBM and Brocade struck a similar deal for the Foundry switches, and at first blush they appear to overlap or conflict. Or do they?
IBM says it does not because its aim is to offer customers options; Junipers says the Foundry switches are earmarked for campus and workgroup environments, while Juniper’s will play in the data center. Brocade appeared to take that as a slight…
In an e-mail to Network World this week, Brocade emphasized that the Foundry NetIron MLX series switches that IBM’s reselling are optimized for virtualized data centers, among other applications. Brocade also claims IBM will expand its IP relationship with Brocade over time — the OEM deal for the Foundry switches announced last April was an “initial” lineup.
Brocade then went on to make some points about what Juniper cannot bring to the table in the IBM relationship: That Juniper is new to the enterprise LAN market, and that its data center background is “lacking” and less than a year old from a product standpoint.
Brocade also noted that Juniper has no storage switching or application delivery capabilities to offer IBM, limiting its relationship. Brocade also provided an analyst quote stating that Juniper lacks name recognition and market share in enterprise data center switching, and will therefore have difficulty gaining access to enterprise data center bidding opportunities.
There’s another angle, which appeared in the comments to our story this week on the IBM OEM deals: That IBM is hedging its bets with both vendors. Brocade acquired Foundry, and future development of Foundry product — as in, developers and engineers leaving Brocade — may be impacted by this. So Juniper is the safety net in case this situation arises.
The other is that indeed, Juniper is a newbie at all this switching and data center stuff. What if IBM can’t sell customers on an untested and unproven Juniper-based system?
We’ll see how it all plays out. In the meantime, can’t we all just get along? Wouldn’t it be more productive to target your sniping at Cisco? We’re sure IBM would agree.
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