According to eweek, Brocade is taking on Cisco in the datacenter for switches.   This is on the heels of some other datacenter news where QLogic competitor Emulex announced they bought ServerEngines for a whooping $225 million when company was doing revenue of only $4 million per quarter ($16m per year).

First the QLogic/Emulex and ServerEngines acquisition. This move for Emulex to by ServerEngines is an attempt for Emulex to get back in the game. Emulex has fallen behind in the datacenter by not investing in any convergence technology which caused them not to have any relevant products for the converged datacenter.

Analysts were not favorable on the Emulex ServerEngine deal in that many think that Emulex overpaid for ServerEngines. Other analysts believe that Emulex had to buy ServerEngines because, as we found out at EMC World, Emulex didn’t own any intellectual property in the FCoE area – particularly in terms of an Ethernet stack and single chip ASIC – which put them at the bottom of the race in the rapidly growing FCoE space.  QLogic is the overall leader in the new FCoE market while Emulex was lagging behind.  This should put Emulex in a more favorable position, but clearly years behind QLogic.

I interviewed QLogic at EMC World and they go into detail on why they are the leaders. #memeconnect #qlogic

Watch live video from The Cube LIVE from SAPphire on Justin.tv

Brocade Jumps Into Cisco Juniper Land – Welcome to the Party

On Brocade verses Cisco. Brocade announces its converged data center plan called Brocade One. Brocade One is touting that they are for the data center operations to compete directly with Cisco’s current UCS and Juniper’s much developed Project Falcon.

Brocade is touting that they can make the data center architecture simpler as enterprises make the move to convergence, cloud computing, and virtualization. This plan from Brocade is the output from their 2008 massive $3 billion buyout of Foundry Networks.

Unified Computing And Converged Datacenter

Brocade is pushing the all-in-one data center offering that tightly integrates compute, storage, networking, management software and virtualization. Brocade claims that they are different than Cisco and Juniper in that Brocade pushe intelligence into the network verses the server. Totally not true at all. In fact, Brocade is copying Juniper’s recent 3-2-1 architecture announcement from last month.

Difference is that Juniper is showing the world architecture and Brocade is not. A copycat move by Brocade on Juniper’s 3-2-1 converged fabric play – taking three tiers, going to two, going to one with Stratus. Juniper is collapsing layers, trying to build a larger and flatter layer-2 network. Juniper is innovating in that they are driving VPLS down into the edge boxes with BGP to set these tunnels up to bridge VLANs together for geographical diversity. This is designed to work well in converged networks and multi-vendor environments.

Here is what Brocade is announcing according to eweek:

Included in the new products is VAL, or Virtual Access Layer, which will provide QoS (quality of service) on each virtual machine run on adapters from Brocade and other vendors. It also will support virtualization technology from the major players, including VMware, Citrix Systems and Microsoft.

Brocade’s VCS (Virtual Cluster Switching) will enhance the performance of Ethernet networking and collapse the networking and aggregation layer, Braham said, which will mean lower latency and lower costs. VCS clusters will scale to support 1,000 10 Gigabit Ethernet ports and 10,000 virtual machines.

Network administrators will be able to manage all of that as a single switch, greatly simplifying the network, he said.

Included in the VCS are three new 10G switches that each includes new ASIC and a new operating system called Brocade Network OS. The switches—which include 24-, 48- and 60-port models—will converge Fibre Channel and IP services onto a Linux core.

The switches will ship in the fourth quarter and in early 2011, according to Brocade.