Seven years after it was founded, Brocade resides at the core of a maturing storage area network marketplace. Its dual goals remain constant—educate customers on SAN best practices and secure industry partnerships.

by Alex Goldman ISP-Planet Associate Editor [June 17, 2002]

Gartner Dataquest recently ranked Brocade Communications Systems, Inc. number one in the overall SAN infrastructure market. According to the high-tech research firm, Brocade increased its total market share to 34 percent in 2001, up from 32 percent in 2000. Dataquest also notes that the company maintained a 58 percent share in the Fibre Channel switching segment.

The news comes a week after Brocade held its Networking Storage Event, where the company introduced pertinent new partners and services to the SAN market. Steve Beer, Brocade director of product marketing, said the success of the event reveals that the SAN market is growing up.

"The SAN market has matured and the SAN infrastructure is being widely deployed and adopted," Beer said. "This presents several new challenges and requirements."

Support partners
Brocade's first challenge is to ensure that its customers have access to support from SAN experts. In order to meet this challenge, Brocade expanded its partnership with Hewlett-Packard Co., one of 19 different companies that recently signed up to be official Brocade Qualified Support Partners (QSP). Naturally, Beer is enthusiastic about the relationship with the global computing company.

"HP becomes a one stop shop providing first call, single call service for SAN infrastructure from heterogeneous providers," Beer said.

The company is making a real commitment. More than 300 HP personnel are set to become "Brocade Certified." The company's global presence in 120 countries with 600 offices allows HP to offer Brocade-based SANs around the clock service support in most major cities worldwide.

Teaching partners
Brocade also partnered with Global Knowledge, a global IT training specialist, in order to expand the number of Brocade-trained certified storage professionals.

As a result of the deal, Global Knowledge will provide classroom and on-site training in Europe, North America and the Asia-Pacific region after courses are completed in the U.S., U.K., Germany, Canada and Hong Kong. Other Global Knowledge clients include Cisco, Nortel Networks, Microsoft, Legato, and Oracle.

Beer is particularly proud that the two companies have built a Brocade Remote SAN Lab at its headquarters in San Jose, Calif.

"Together, we're providing formally structured courses with an online element that includes a remote SAN lab on which students complete homework and also can test themselves on a real SAN that contains other vendors' products," Beer explained. "We feel it's important that people get a real live experience on real products."

To further aid eager students, Brocade has built a SAN Info Center containing white papers, an return-on-investment calculator and other useful information.

Brocade recently added a new level of certification to its program that covers SAN design and management, in recognition of the fact that many companies now have a dedicated IT manager for their SAN infrastructure on staff.

Interoperable partners
As SANs deployment becomes more mainstream, builders are demanding that the various products work together. Brocade announced it has made progress in this regard on several fronts.

For data backup, Brocade expanded an already existing partnership with Computer Associates. The two companies have certified that several hardware and software combinations are wholly interoperable. Additionally, Brocade and CA have published two solution guides to help enterprises that use both of their gear.

To further the interoperational capabilities of its data backup lineup, Brocade extended similar partnerships with Sony and BMC Software. Brocade deepened ties in order to better deliver its serverless backup solutions and advanced fabric management features in select Sony tape drives and BMC applications, respectively.

Other partners whose products also utilize the Brocade Fabric Access Application Programming Interface (API) to enable products to work with Brocade switches include InterSAN, Invio, Netreon, Prisa, Sun Microsystems and VERITAS.

Brocade has assembled an impressive list of partners that will likely maintains the company's dominant role in the SAN market for years to come.

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