Brocade moves into HBA market
Network storage specialist Brocade announced figures on Friday showing a doubling of revenue, largely thanks to its merger last year with storage switch specialist McData, and said that it will expand into the host bus adapter (HBA) and intelligent server adapter markets.
This increases Brocade's involvement in corporate networking and brings it into greater competition with Cisco, already Brocade's biggest competitor in the fibre channel storage switch market.
This is a direct challenge to Cisco for control of corporate networks, and impinges on market segments important to some Brocade partners, such as Emulex. "This allows [IT managers] to take advantage of critical technologies, such as server virtualisation, data mobility, and robust data protection," said Rick Villars, vice president of Storage Systems Research at IDC.
The Brocade 2110 iSCSI Initiator HBA is an iSCSI connection for enterprise servers running Microsoft Windows or Linux operating systems. There is also a range of 4Gbps fibre channel HBAs that use PCI Express.
Their intelligent server adapters include products for 8Gbps fibre channel and 10Gb Ethernet, the company said. The Brocade 2110 HBA is available immediately and the Brocade 4Gbps fibre Channel HBAs are expected to be available at the end of July 2007, while the next-generation Brocade intelligent server adapters are planned to be available in 2008.
According to Tom Buiocchi, Brocade vice president of marketing: "By adding server connectivity products to our leadership SAN portfolio, we are now uniquely positioned to address broader data centre requirements and increase the value that we deliver to enterprise customers."
On Thursday, Brocade reported second-quarter results, now with McData fully incorporated, that show that income was $345m (£173m), an increase of 54 percent from $224m (£112m) in the first quarter. Profits were almost extinguished at 98 percent down on the first quarter, but the company quoted one-off issues connected with the McData deal, including income tax adjustments, as accounting for most of the damage.