While Brocade was the last major storage area networking vendor to announce its entrance into the Fibre Channel over Ethernet market last week, the announcement positioned its entry as a high performance end-to-end solutions provider for the data center. They announced two product families: single-chip 1010 single-port and 1020 dual-port converged network adapters (CNA) and the 8000 series FCoE switch that ships with (24) 10Gb CEE ports and (8) 8 Gb. FC ports.   Although its 1U 8000 series switch specifies line rate performance, this top-of-the-rack switch requires a license upgrade to deliver ISL trunking features, advanced performance monitoring, and Fabric Watch.   Brocade boasts that its 10xx series CNAs are the highest performance CNAs on the market and deliver 500,00 IOPs/port. QLogic’s 815x CNA, for comparison purposes, delivers 250,000 IOPs/port.  Like QLogic’s single-chip CNA, Brocade’s CNA includes a full hardware transaction offload for FCoE processing.  Customers who currently utilize Brocade’s ECFM management product will also be required to upgrade to its DCFM product.

Brocade’s timing for its announcement is important as it has stated in its last earnings call that it plans to capture 10% of the host adapter market share in Q4 of this year.  While Brocade must rely on expanding the market for  its 4 Gb. and 8 Gb. FC host adapters to meet this objective, the availability of its FCoE products will contribute to Brocade’s host adapter product offering and its drive towards gaining market share.