Big Blue, Brocade to show united front to Cisco

IBM is about to supply Brocade's Foundry-based networking products, according to persistent rumours reported by Reuters and others. Neither company has commented on this matter, although Brocade has said that it expects to benefit through closer ties with server partners, following Cisco's entry into the server market. IBM is …

[Matt Bryant]

No outright rejection of CISCO, though.

Sure, IBM will want to kick uppitty CISCO about a bit in public, but not too much. They still use a shedload of CISCO kit in areas like their Catalyst-based blades interconnect modules, and the IBM SVC product is pure CISCO tech. With storage virtualisation of existing SANs looking like being a key market in a downturn where array sales are likely to drop, IBM can't afford to junk the SVC offering. Getting cuddly with Brocade makes sense as Brocade are the leader in the SAN switch market, and likley to lead in converting exisiting SANs into "unified" LANs, whilst CISCO still lead in pure LAN installations and so will be the lead attacker in converting LAN-only shops to FCOE. IBM needs both on their side.