Brocade announces intent to buy Foundy — Why would Brocade do this?

The writing was on the wall … Either become a Ethernet company or get crushed by Cisco.

The world is converging to Ethernet and IP. What happened to Telecom is now happening in the Data Center. Parallel infrastructures are costly to support, implement, operate, and maintain. Why have a completely separate infrastructure for Storage (Fibre Channel) when you have an existing Ethernet infrastructure completely capable of Storage networking?

While Cisco already has a Fibre Channel over Ethernet - FCoE - switch shipping today, the Cisco Nexus 5000 — Brocade has nothing, was caught sleeping at the wheel, and now needs to play catch up.

Buying Foundry still puts Brocade way behind. Ok, so Brocade has some Ethernet switches to sell now — big deal. It takes a tremendous amount of investment and R&D to bring a FCoE capable switch to market — Foundry doesn’t have any product in their portfolio to offer Brocade here.

Did Brocade buy Foundry to acquire some expertise in Ethernet? I think so.

So now that Brocade has some Foundry engineers who know Ethernet, presumably they will both go off and make an FCoE product together. Fine and dandy. But how long will that take? 12-18 months would be highly optimistic.

Meanwhile, Cisco will be capturing the hearts and minds of Data Center decision makers today with a rich FCoE offering in Nexus 5000. Cisco will also be many years ahead with OSM agreements, certifications, and joint support relationships for FCoE.

The biggest news here is that Brocade has validated today with $3B of their own money that what Cisco has been saying and doing for years is true — the market wants a unified fabric running the Data Center, and the fabric of choice is Ethernet.

Interesting enough, just a few weeks ago Brocade said adoption of FCoE will not happen until 2010. A convenient prediction to make when you don’t have an FCoE product to offer the market. Brocade almost got that one right, they were close. Had they said “Brocade customers will not adopt FCoE until 2010 because we wont have a product to sell them until 2010…” — Now that would be a 100% accurate prediction.

The problem Brocade faces is that while the Data Center is converging to Ethernet — Brocade has no credibility or experience, as a company, with Ethernet. Cisco has been the leader in Ethernet for over 20 years, and a leader in Storage (Fibre Channel) networking for almost 10 years. Cisco has world class offerings for both Ethernet and Fibre Channel.

Brocade spent $3B just to say, “oh, we’re an Ethernet company too..” — That’s it, that’s all they got for their money today. They still have to go off and bring a FCoE strategy to the market. How much additional $$ and time will that take?

Who knows. But I would like to take this opportunity to thank Brocade for casting a $3B vote that says Cisco’s Data Center 3.0 strategy was right all along.

Cheers,

Brad

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What is the new Cisco Nexus 5000? — The industry first switch to deliver unified server I/O, providing Fiber Channel and IP traffic over a single 10G Ethernet port to the server.  Nexus 5000 delivers very low latency wire speed lossless Ethernet service to the server.

Well, it’s that time again. Time to re-certify my CCIE R&S certification by passing the written test. To prepare for the re-certification test I am reading from the book CCIE Routing and Switching Exam Guide Volume 3 (a very good book!).

The bottom line is this: The CCIE Routing and Switching written exam is a TOUGH TEST not be taken lightly. Even a veteran CCIE like myself can fail it miserably if you are not careful.

As I read through the book I will take some notes and post them here.
Here is Part 1…

One of my accounts had an unfortunate network outage that lasted about an hour. This outage was caused by human error with VTP but not in the classic revision number way we have heard about before.

Here is what happened…

IEEE 802.1Q (sometimes referred to as 1Q or DOT1Q) is a industry standards based implementation of carring traffic for multiple VLANs on a single trunking interface between two Ethernet switches. 802.1Q is for Ethernet networks only.

Unlike ISL , 802.1Q does not encapsulate the original Ethernet frame.

For Ethernet V2 frames, 802.1Q inserts a new 4-byte field between the SA and TYPE fields of the original Ethernet frame. Since the addition of this new DOT1Q field changes the original frame, 802.1Q also recomputes and rewrites the original 4-byte FCS at the end of the frame.
802.1Q Header Insertion into Ethernet II frame (click image to enlarge)