It's official: Cisco and Brocade are going to war. The two had a hard breakup recently, and Cisco is set to announce their new Fibre Channel switch, that also supports iSCSI, priced to go head-to-head with the market leader. I'm hoping it gets ugly, but the truth is Cisco still doesn't have enough people that speak storage to really make waves.
The other word is EMC is courting some BIG software company to the tune of a couple billion dollars. BMC is kind of the logical assumption, knowing that former BMC bigwig Chris Gahagan just joined EMC, and EMC Chairman Mike Ruettgers was seen kibitzing with Bob Beauchamp, BMC CEO, at TechTarget's Storage Management show [TechTarget is Storage magazine's parent company] in Chicago recently.
Veritas quietly laid off about a few hundred people a few weeks ago, although the company says it will hire more people in other positions in coming months. Also gone is Howard Silver, whose tenure as ServPoint honcho apparently didn't survive new Executive VP Mark Bregman's regime.
Sounds like another layoff occurred at Storage Networks recently, but they won't comment either.
A senior IT person working for the great state of Maine got a hold of us to let us know about a Veritas goof up - seems he was ready to buy about $350,000 worth of NetBackup but instead spent $50,000 on Backup Exec because no sales guy responded to him.
Sam Tam from Vicom is no longer the CEO. He sits on the board, but is out of the day-to-day. Who's Vicom? Didn't know they were a virtualization player? Maybe that's the problem.
Word is that Merrill Lynch gave Brocade a hard order for 40 of the new 12000 boxes - at $250,000 each, and we understand that there could be 60 more behind this one. I guess they didn't order them from IBM, since IBM poo-poo'ed the 12000 in a recent internal report.
It looks like StorageApps turned HP CTO Mike Feinberg has found a home in the new HP/Compaq game as Storage CTO. He's been on the road with Compaq storage god Mark Lewis spreading the new gospel. It's a pretty good story so far.
Adaptec has generated a lot of buzz around iSCSI and TCP/IP offload engine chips in the OEM space. We hope someone starts to deliver something. Doesn't it seem like a hundred years ago we started talking about this stuff?
Compaq has an RFP on the street code-named Atlas for a next generation switching platform with enough real smarts to run their VersaStor virtualization code. It seems Brocade is panicking, since it doesn't have the smarts in its switches to meet the spec. Judging by how many switches Compaq ships, this is a big win for whoever gets it.
Keep the dirt coming.
Behind the Firewall is written by a team of industry insiders who, for obvious reasons, prefer to remain anonymous. If you have tips, send them to btf@storagemagazine.com.
