The SAN switch and director maker says it is already shipping iSCSI server-to-network adaptor cards to its OEM customers for testing, and will begin doing the same with Fibre Channel HBA cards this summer.
The $1bn-plus HBA market has been very heavily dominated by the duopoly of Emulex and QLogic for some years, which might make it look like a very tough sector to enter.
Brocade says it principal motivation is not to create another revenue stream, but to improve the company’s technical scope.
That’s the principal reason for doing this. It’s not about cutting the pie into three, but about innovation, said Brocade marketing vice president Tom Buiocchi, before stressing: It’s not going to be a charitable organization. It’s going to make money.
Examples of areas where Brocade might be able to extend the functions of its SAN switches via integration with its own HBAs are management, end-to-end encryption, QoS, and boot-from-SAN, Buiocchi said. Customers are asking us to do things, and if we’re on both the server and on the switch, we can innovate, he said.
Asked why QLogic and Emulex would not want to cooperate with Brocade in order to maintain the competiveness of their HBAs, Buiocchi argued that the duo compete with Brocade in some areas.
That competition is very limited, but Buiocchi said: Innovation across two companies is always more difficult than across just one, he said.
The iSCSI cards that Brocade says that OEMs are already sampling is based on technology originally developed by Silverback Systems, a start-up that Brocade bought in January.
The 4GFC HBAs that Brocade will begin sampling in the summer will be made by LSI Logic. Was LSI Logic the foundry for Silverback? Buiocchi said that even if it was, that wasn’t the reason why Brocade has turned to LSI as an HBA supplier.
The unstated but obvious reason is that LSI was the only viable alternative to Emulex and QLogic, with whom there would have been no advantage in setting up an OEM deal.
While the HBAs that Brocade will ship this summer will simply be re-branded versions of existing LSI products, Brocade says that next year it will ship 8GFC HBAs.
How much of the silicon and firmware in those devices will be developed by Brocade and how much by LSI is not clear, but Brocade CEO Mike Klayko said: Really this is going to be Brocade’s intellectual property.
Over the last two years Brocade has been diversifying from the supply Fibre Channel switch and directors into other areas such as WAFS systems, SAN-based data migration devices, and file management products.
Sales in these areas have not been dramatic, and there have been few OEM wins, and none with major suppliers.
Yes it’s been slow, but these are areas where we’re creating markets, Buiocchi said. Brocade’s so-called FAN File Area Network sales were up 72% year-on-year and 25% sequentially in the company’s latest quarter, he said.
Do we wish we were further ahead? Yes. But we’re on track, he said.
Our View: It’s not obvious what the benefits to Brocade of this move will be. It may be that LSI has offered favorable prices to Brocade on the assumption that Brocade cannot hurt as an alternative route to market.
If Brocade were to build technical features into its directors and switches that only worked with its brand of HBA, and not with those of Emulex and QLogic, it could dis-affect Brocade’s customers. Cisco will be in no rush to qualify and support Brocade HBAs, which means that the Brocade cards would work only with Brocade SANs, and so would be a form of vendor lock-in.
