A day after completing its acquisition of McData, Brocade got down to the business of integrating the two companies (see BrocData Cleared for Takeoff).
Brocade dismissed McData’s senior management team, although two members of McData’s board, Renato “Renny” DiPentima and John Gerdelman, will join Brocade’s board of directors, and the company also laid off 330 of 2,870 employees.
“Brocade is growing and diversifying as a company and we need and will benefit from the valuable skills and capabilities McData employees provide,” said spokesperson Ginnie Hazlett.
The company also issued a comprehensive roadmap for the integration of the two companies’ product lines. Brocade will become the master brand name for all products, according to the document.
Brocade will keep both Brocade and McData SAN directors, which will now be called the Brocade 48000, M6140 and Mi10K.
The architectures and best features of the systems will be incorporated into a common SAN director platform at the 8 Gbit/sec Fibre Channel transition, estimated for 2008. “We will design this new SAN director platform to be fully interoperable and backward compatible with all three of the current director platforms,” Brocade said.
For SAN management software, Brocade said McData’s Enterprise Fabric Connectivity Manager (EFCM) “will become the converged management application for all SAN products, evolving to incorporate functionality from Brocade Fabric Manager. This solution can already manage Brocade SAN switches and directors as well as McData products, and we will develop it further to accommodate future products and technologies.”
Brocade Fabric Manager will continue to be offered and enhanced until the converged Brocade EFCM application is available with Fabric Manager functionality, expected in the first half of 2008. The Brocade SAN Health Family will continue to be available for Brocade, McData, or mixed environments.
Brocade will consolidate SAN router offerings on the Brocade 7500 and Brocade FR4-18i in the next six months, phasing out the McData 2640 and 1620 in 2007, with an additional five years of support.
The Brocade 4100 and 4900 switches, the McData UltraNet Edge Storage Router (now called the Brocade Edge M3000) and McData UltraNet Edge Storage Director eXtended 6 and 12 (now called the Brocade USD-X6 and USD-X12) will all continue.
The Brocade Fibre Channel switch architecture, used in the Brocade 200E, 4100 and 4900, will provide the foundation for the SAN switch product line. The McData Sphereon 4400 and 4700 switches will be phased out in 2007, with five years of support.
Brocade will also continue to offer its blade server modules while discontinuing those from McData, and the Brocade Fabric Application Platform will be renamed the Brocade AP7420 and the McData Application Services Module discontinued.
Brocade will also discontinue the McData SpectraNet Replicator, WDS Accelerator (from Riverbed) and Virtual Tape Library.