Oof! Brocade posts a loss after taking $81m kick in the profits

After four quarters of profits Brocade has posted a $14m loss, due to a costly goodwill write-off as it exits a hardware business. Revenues for the quarter were $537m, down five per cent from the prior quarter’s $565m and the year-ago quarter’s $539m (down one per cent). Three months ago it made a profit of $81m; this time it …

[kenon]

Brocade's new management is a joke

With all the cost cutting done and no growth in sight - the CEO says there will be no material software revenues until end of '15, which mean, nothing to write home even in '16, I wonder what else can the poor management say about FCoE other than kicking it down. They sound defensive when it comes to Fcoe. But what choice do they have? Fcoe works in my lab and I wonder why I should be paying those ridiculous prices EMC/Brocade charge me for those FC switches. Don't those Ethernet switches that can run Fcoe also can run other things as well? How come they are much cheaper than the FC switches that do less?

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Brocade's new management is a joke

Just run 10GbE iSCSI.

The reason that FCoE is dead in the water is not because it doesn't work, but because it's expensive and complex: FCoE was being driven by a certain ethernet switch vendor with the point of view of introducing a new technology to drive more switch port sales. It didn't work.

10GbE iSCSi gives you everything you need in this space without the complexity of emulating FC over Ethernet.

[kenon]

Re: Brocade's new management is a joke

I have run 10gb iSCSI. Have you? Have you run it any decent size?

TCP doesn't play well when the switches become shallow buffered. And most data center Ethernet switches are skimping on buffers to increase port densities and performance. You can build simple and small 10G networks with iSCSI. Not large SANs. Then again, who needs SANs anyways. Vmware's VSAN looks interesting.