Brocade, McData Branch Out To Remote Offices

The two leading suppliers of SAN switches are branching out--literally.

Brocade and McData, best known for their switches for interconnecting SANs over dedicated storage networks, today both launched new efforts to grow into the fast-growing segment of branch-office data consolidation.

In the past year, branch-office consolidation has become a key play for both network and storage solution providers because customers want to house their branch-office data at data centers. They're doing so by deploying wide-area file services (WAFS technology), which effectively provides local caches for frequently accessed files, as well as WAN optimization products and application accelerators.

"It's a market that's very much ramping up," says Greg Schulz, founder and principal analyst at StorageIO, a Stillwater, Minn.-based consulting and market research firm. "It's a solution that has a play at the high end, as well as at the entry-level and midsize enterprise market."

McData, which has lagged its counterpart Brocade and key rival Cisco in offering branch-office consolidation solutions, has launched what it calls the ROC-Remote Office Consolidation portfolio of products and services.Key to McData's ROC offering are OEM pacts with FalconStor and Riverbed, suppliers of replication software and file-acceleration appliances, respectively. McData's first solution to address branch-office consolidation is SpectraNet for Exchange, based on FalconStor's IPStor technology (the two companies first came together through CNT, a McData rival that it acquired last year).

"This reaffirms McData's commitment to using FalconStor's technology," Schulz says.

The software enables organizations to keep their Exchange mailboxes at the data center and provide remote copies, adds Raj Das, McData's vice president of product marketing.

"What we'd like to do is drive as much data to the core," he says, adding that Microsoft Exchange data is a good example of data that is spread throughout the enterprise.

In addition to offering the FalconStor solution, McData will offer Riverbed's Stealhead appliances, which it will call SpectraNet WDS Accelerator.Riverbed has been successful with its Stealhead products, which offer WAN optimization, application acceleration and support for WAFS, claiming many hundreds of installations. An OEM relationship last year with Hewlett-Packard has helped spread the footprint of Riverbed technologies, Schulz adds, though neither company would provide specific numbers.

By bringing McData on as a partner, Riverbed can extend the reach of its Stealhead appliances to other McData OEM partners, including EMC, IBM and Sun Microsystems. For McData, it fills a hole in its portfolio that its rivals have already addressed--Brocade through an OEM relationship with Riverbed rival Tacit Networks, and Cisco, which has its own WAFS technology acquired from Actona two years ago.

For its part, Brocade says it is combining its two channel programs--Elite and Tapestry Partner--into what it is calling its Alliance Partner Network. The former covered its SAN switching gear and the latter was for those selling its Tapestry line, which includes the WAFS offering, the Application Resource Manager and the Data Migration Manager.

Under the new channel program, Brocade will offer monthly accrued MDFs, free sales and training for Tapestry products, and access to a partner site that offers sales engineering support and a presence on Brocade's public Web site.

"A very large portion of our business goes to our channel through OEMs," said Tony Craythorne, Brocade's director of worldwide channel sales, noting that its SAN switches are bundled with enterprise storage products offered by EMC, IBM, Hitach Data Systems, Sun, Network Appliance and HP, among others. With the new products and the desire to target emerging enterprises, Brocade wants to expand its presence through solution providers."We have targeted some new VARs that can help us drive more into the solutions focus, not necessarily Brocade's traditional customer, which today is a very much storage focused," he said. Still, Brocade only has 25 channel partners and has set a goal of about 40.

Brocade will end up picking up some channel partners from NuView, a company it acquired last week. NuView's StorageX, which lets administrators add, consolidate, migrate and automate failover of distributed servers and NAS appliances without having to impact user access to data during the process. StorageX, which will be added to the Tapestry line, will compliment the WAFS product, company officials said. NuView also offers a handful of other data management tools.