Although Brocade’s multi-protocol routers currently support the IP-based challenger to the Fibre Channel protocol, Brocade’s switches and directors have yet to provide native support for iSCSI.
Come September 12, there’ll be a lot more, said Brocade marketing vice president Tom Buiocchi. We may be ahead on iSCSI by the end of the year. We’re pretty bullish on iSCSI, he added, without giving any more details.
While Brocade will almost certainly continue to argue that iSCSI is technically inferior to FC and so is not suitable for high-end storage networking, Buiocchi’s comments represent a predictable shift in policy for Brocade. Analysts have been warning that like McData Corp, the company would do better to embrace the inevitable arrival of iSCSI into the SAN market, rather than ignore it. Cisco Systems Inc’s directors and switches have provided native iSCSI support for some while.
Buiocchi acknowledged that Brocade’s forthcoming merger with McData Corp is bound to give Cisco an opportunity to poach disaffected customers from McData. But he said that it was price worth paying. Cisco is capable of doing this anyway they’ve already been taking market share, he said.
We’ve given the customers investment protection, and a roadmap. Hopefully we’ll lose none, or only a few, he said. Brocade has told analysts that the merger will be accretive to earnings in the fourth quarter of joint operations, and that it would still be accretive even if 30% of McData’s business was lost.
The large overlap between Brocade and McData’s product portfolios has thrown a cloud over the future of some of the two company’s products, and Gartner has warned its clients to only buy McData gear when interoperability with existing McData networks is needed, or when special McData director features are needed.
That advice is a little premature. McData has incredible following in the mainframe sector, and they have all of the long distance networking gear we don’t have. It’s not clear what’s staying and what’s going, Buiocchi said. To say it all goes to one [existing portfolio] might be an oversimplification.
One action that Brocade might take to minimize any defections to Cisco would be to provide interoperability between Brocade and McData gear, so easing the pain of transition for customers.
The plan is that if customers want it, we’ll provide full interoperability from switch to switch. We’ve just started looking at this. The goal would be no compromises at all [full functional interoperability] that’s what people are talking about, Buiocchi said.
Currently, SANs built using Brocade and McData gear – or using any two different vendors’ gear – can only be linked by switching to the functionally limited or dumb interoperability mode, or by using routers sold by both Brocade and McData. The routers however can only connect SAN islands together, and do not allow the full mixing of Brocade and McData gear that interoperability engineering would deliver.
But Buiocchi stressed that the latter would only be undertaken if there was sufficient customer demand. I’d guess it would not be easy to do. It wouldn’t be an overnight job.
Interoperability between different SAN vendors’ gear has reportedly been delivered in the past. The people who have touted interoperability before have delivered something that we could break in 30 seconds, Buiocchi said.
