infoTECH Feature

August 25, 2010

Brocade Diversifies Products to Serve a Much Broader Market

(Editor’s Note: This article refers to a video interview shot in San Jose as part of TMCnet’s “On the Road” video series. To view the entire library of videos from Road Shows and other industry shows, as well as product demos and interviews in our in-house studio, visit TMCnet Videos home page.)

As part of this video series, Brocade Communications Systems’ Senior Director of Product Marketing Ananda Rajagopal (News - Alert) presented an overview of the company, including future directions, to TMCnet’s CEO Rich Tehrani. In a 30-second outline, Rajagopal described Brocade (News - Alert) as a $2 billion company providing high performance networking solutions to three key market segments, which include Enterprise Networks, Service Providers and Data Centers.

He also said that since the acquisition of Foundry Networks (News - Alert) some 18 months ago, Brocade has diversified its product lines to offer not only storage area switches but also IP routers and switches, as well as application load balances for the three broad markets.

When asked about what interesting things were happening in the market, Rajagopal swiftly highlighted the 10 GbE converged network adapters (CNA) introduced in June. Offering highest I/O operations per second (IOPS) and throughput performance, the product marketing director indicated that Brocade’s latest CNAs outperformed the competing products. 

With exploding video traffic on the network, the demand for much broader bandwidth with falling prices is tremendously high. So Tehrani asked Rajagopal to explain how Brocade was playing in this model of bandwidth usage rapidly going up while prices were coming down. Calling it as a fantastic question, Rajagopal commented “In my view, at no point in the history of networking has cost/bit as a parameter been as important as today for all the reasons you (Tehrani) have outlined.”

As the gap between the revenues and what it takes to upgrade the infrastructure is shrinking, the service providers are incredibly focused on optimizing the cost/bit parameter, noted Rajagopal. “As a vendor, it a challenge to rise to this occasion,” said Rajagopal. Articulating his company’s approach to address this issue, the marketing director stated that “We have great IPs, in terms of ASICs, that go into this platform.” “And the secret sauce that powers it”. “Together, it helps us create a solution that can be incorporated in a single router to achieve the desired lower cost/bit”, asserted Rajagopal.

Consequently, he concluded, “Carriers and service providers are laser focused on scale, performance and economics.”

When asked about what’s next at Brocade, Rajagopal quickly pointed to emerging 100 GbE Ethernet standard. Here, he added, “We have the capabilities to showcase our products and strength.”


Ashok Bindra is a veteran writer and editor with more than 25 years of editorial experience covering RF/wireless technologies, semiconductors and power electronics. To read more of his articles, please visit his columnist page.

Edited by Marisa Torrieri
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