Users Ponder Life Under Brocade

Between making acquisitions and expanding into areas like WAFS, McData users are concerned Brocade will be too distracted by integration issues to deal with customer issues and support. (See Brocade Bags McData For $713M and Brocade Buys McData.)

"Pulling in McData seems to be stretching Brocade's focus," warns Jackson Shea, co-founder of the Portland Storage Networking User Group (SNUG) and a storage administrator at an Oregon-based firm. For example, "Brocade has been stretching into the WAN acceleration space with the Tapestry product line," he explains. (See Brocade Unrolls Tapestry , Brocade CTO Looking at Data Center, and Nortel Embeds Brocade Tech.)

Shea, who uses a total of 1,200 McData ports across three separate sites, is less bullish about the deal with Brocade than the two companies' executives. "McData has been the Ford truck of the storage switch world. It's rock-solid and dependable," he says. "Brocade hasn't had the same reputation for some time."

Another McData customer says he's also concerned over the amount of attention Brocade will devote to McData. "There is some concern about that," says Mike Campbell, director of PC systems at University of New Mexico (UNM) Hospitals, adding that it is too early to tell how much of a problem this will be.

One issue that appears to unite both Brocade and McData users is the problem of dwindling competition, with Cisco now offering the only big-name switch alternative to a combined Brocade-McData. "The more choices out there, usually you get a bit better price performance and also more technology being developed," explains Campbell, who uses a McData Intrepid director and five Sphereon switches within his infrastructure. (See McData Wins in New Mexico.)Like Brocade users, Campbell told Byte and Switch that he is also eager to find out more details about long-term product roadmaps from Brocade. (See Users Mull Merger.)

As far as competition is concerned, customers are awaiting possible price-cutting from Cisco. Last year, for example, EMC launched an incentive program to tempt backup Veritas customers during that vendor's merger with Symantec. (See EMC Pulls Switch on Veritas and Symantec & Veritas: It's a Deal.)

The tactic isn't limited to switches and backup software. Seagate execs, speaking on the disk maker's earnings call, admitted that they feel price pressure from rivals in the wake of the firm's $1.9 billion acquisition of Maxtor. (See Seagate Reports Q4, Seagate Munches Maxtor, and Seagate Closes Maxtor Deal.)

But Ross McCarroll, founding member of the U.K. Storage Networking User Group (U.K. SNUG) and technical account manager of Berkshire, U.K.-based consulting firm HPS, feels that the Brocade/McData deal can only spell good news for users. "I see it as a good thing because McData [was] always in the larger director-class switches and Brocade tended not to be in that area," he says. "The two combined together is good competition for Cisco."

In documents filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) last week, Brocade promised that users will get more detail on product roadmaps when the transaction closes, which is expected to be by the end of this year. Until that time, Brocade and McData will continue to operate independently and compete in the same markets.In the SEC documents, Brocade claims that the deal will drive interoperability between the two vendors' products and provide "unified management" of switch technologies.

Brocade, however, is offering migration services for McData customers who want to move over to its platform, which suggests that Brocade's technology will dominate future product releases.

James Rogers, Senior Editor, Byte and Switch