Living on OEM Time

It's not easy being a SAN switch vendor: You sell products at the whim of storage vendors. Sometimes those relationships are more whimsical than others.

Consider the OEM deals of McData Corp. (Nasdaq: MCDTA), for instance.

McData this week announced general availability of the Eclipse 1620 through an OEM deal with IBM Corp. (NYSE: IBM) and a reseller deal with Sun Microsystems Inc. (Nasdaq: SUNW) 21 months after the supplier started shipping the multiprotocol router (see IBM & Sun Team With McDATA ).

The long wait is especially strange in IBM’s case. Big Blue has had an OEM deal with McData since last October, and twice announced certification for the Eclipse 1620 last year – once with its SAN Volume Controller (SVC) virtualization appliance and once with its Shark SAN system (see IBM Certifies McData SAN Router and McData SAN Router Works With IBM. IBM started OEMing McData’s larger multiprotocol router, the Eclipse 2640, back in March (see IBM Qualifies McData Switches).

In total, IBM has been reselling the Eclipse 1260 router for more than a year. With the new OEM deal, IBM sells the router under its brand and handles support for the device.Maybe IBM didn't want to spring for extra brochures?

IBM isn't alone. In explaining why EMC Corp. (NYSE: EMC) has yet to qualify his company’s i10K director switch, McData CEO John Kelley in June said EMC is just being “thorough” in its testing (see McData Cuts & Shuffles). Kelley says EMC is shipping the director under limited GA but has yet to qualify it.

Kelley can only hope EMC isn’t as "thorough" about the i10K as IBM and Sun have been with the Eclipse 1620. If EMC starts selling the director by October, as Kelley hopes, that would be nine months after the product launched. Since EMC is McData's largest OEM partner, time is wearing on the switch vendor.

As for IBM and the i10K, Big Blue started selling it as a branded product in March – two months after it launched. Go figure.

— Dave Raffo, Senior Editor, Byte and Switch0