My first reaction to Brocade buying Foundry yesterday was “hmmmmmmmmm”. I was scratching my head as to why Brocade would want to jump into the highly commoditized LAN switching market, where Cisco dominates. What’s the market differentiator? Why would I start buying LAN switches from Brocade all of sudden. Certainly they are having enough fun competing with Cisco in the SAN market, why jump into LAN switching? Juniper recently jumped into the LAN market and their sole differentiator was JunOS, not the hardware. So, what gives? Then I started thinking there has to be some synergy that Brocade is looking for and that has to be FCoE. FCoE, if it’s the success everyone is predicting it will be, has the ability to wreck the SAN market which relies on a lot of very expensive ports. FC ports are not cheap and I’m sure Brocade’s profits are tied to that. But here comes FCoE where I can start connecting all my FC hosts to Ethernet, saving big bucks. Intel has even released a software FCoE stack so I can – at my own peril – use standard Ethernet NICs for FCoE. Yes, I’ll still need a couple director level SAN switches at the core, but customers are still saving a ton of cash. Plus, Brocade needed a way to protect their business model. If Brocade customers started buying Cisco Nexus 5000 switches to connect hosts at the access layer via FCoE, how long would it take Cisco to convince that customer to replace Brocade’s director switches with a pair of Cisco MDS switches. Yeah, not too long. Then what is Brocade left with? So, this should be an interesting play. If I am going to update my DC LAN environment with FCoE I have to use Cisco’s new – and, um, pricey – Nexus line anyways. That’s a change in architecture, not a normal evolution of the 6500 or 4500 series. So, if the cost is low enough for Brocade/Foundry FCoE and I already have a Brocade SAN, do I make the jump to Brocade? Might be worth the look.
More >From the Field blog entries:
The Underlying Message of John Chambers Keynote at Networkers
Cisco Networkers Network Performance
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