Brocade Buys Foundry, Eyes Converged Networks

FOR A WHILE NOW, storage networking leader Brocade has talked about providing the complete data center network-a cool notion that rang hollow to all but the most single-minded storage pros. Problem was, Ethernet was a mystery to the company, and in the slow-growing Fibre Channel storage area network market, it found itself an encumbered partner for vendors such as EMC, Hewlett-Packard, and IBM with the prospect of Converged Enhanced Ethernet on the horizon. As Brocade CEO Mike Klayko puts it, "the industry is at an inflection point."

So what's a cash-rich, soon-to-be-marginalized vendor to do? The answer for Brocade was to buy a marginalized Ethernet player-Foundry Networks -in a bet that one plus one adds up to more than two. The idea is that in the data center, the combined company...