“We didn’t say let’s build a green product. We just built the most reliable product,” he says. Using fewer chips and better ASIC designs means more reliable products, with fewer chips – and they draw less power.
Pushing into the LAN
Pushing into the LAN is partly politics, he says, and Brocade’s storage strength is already opening doors for the Foundry products. Large organisations have a CIO, and separate people in charge of storage and networks: “We have access to the storage director and the CIO – we can ask to be introduced to the network side.”
Pressure for better returns on an investmen are already putting pressure on customers’ affection for Cisco, he says: “We expected to find that 30 percent of LAN customers would stick to Cisco no matter what – we’ve found that element is much smaller than we thought.” It’s also a help that IP switches are easy to mix and match between vendors.
Foundry products were typically not as price-competitive as they might have been, says Phillips, partly because of the company’s insistence on manufacturing in America. “We can drive significant cost out of the Foundry products, by moving the manufacturing.” That would allow better margins for resellers, as well as better prices for users.
Overall, vendors are moving into new areas, driving more mergers and acquisitions. Ethernet switch makers like Extreme and Juniper will need to have storage products, and server makers will have to think about their partnerships with SAN players: “There will be consolidation, and convergence is inevitable,” says Phillips.
But Brocade, he thinks will be more of a match for Cisco in the contests it chooses.
Page: 1 2
New chapter for LastPass as it becomes an independent company to focus on cybersecurity, after…
US FCC seeks to ban Chinese telecom firms at centre of national security concerns from…
Two updates to Anthropic's AI chatbot Claude sees arrival of a new business-focused plan, as…
Most people in the United States view TikTok as a Chinese influence tool a poll…
UK regulator confirms it is investigating whether OnlyFans is doing enough to prevent children accessing…
Dismissed staff file complaint with a US labor board, and allege Google unlawfully terminated their…
View Comments
It is impressive how Mr. Phillips turns his company's weaknesses into strengths. He claims, "they're telling users to swap out their MDS and Catalyst 6500 switches". I would wonder, how long Mr. Phillips has been with the industry, as for the last 7 years we have seen 4 generations of Brocade SAN switches, each of them requiring fork-lift upgrade, and that is not counting platforms from their acquisitions they have obliterated almost immediately thereafter (CNT, McDATA, etc.). All of that while MDS platform has never changed since its introduction in 2003 -- only new line-cards.
The other source of long-lasting contention Mr. Phillips refers to is power consumption. While the difference per Mr. Phillips "won't save the planet", the underlying argument is what attracts more attention -- why Brocade/Foundry products are so power-efficient? Better chip design? Doesn't sound too plausible -- with all Cisco R&D potential, they wouldn't have a problem with quality in such a sensitive area. A more believable idea comes to mind -- could it be that Brocade/Foundry products don't have as much functionality as The Competitor's? Something much more valuable to customers than a miniscule win on power? Something that has been referred to for a long time as being penny-wise, but pound-foolish? The customer should be the ultimate judge.
Let's talk about rip-and-replace. Brocade has ripped and replaced so many platforms over last 6 years. 12000, 24000, 48000 and now DCX. All fork-lift upgrades with no investment protection at all. And this does not even count all the acquired and EoL'd products. Your competition has innovated through evolution. Products shipped since 2002 are still supported today with all the latest features. That's called investment protection.
Also, the article claims that power used by network devices is a very small percentage of total server power. The marginal power saving from Brocade are far out-weighed by the cost of rip-and-replace and lack of integrated intelligence in Brocade switches.
Talk is cheap. Execution is not.