Chronology of Brocade-Mcdata relationship:
5/31/96 - Purchase & License Agreement
11/1/96 - Technology License & Development Agreement
1996 - Mcdata acquires HWP's CNO (Canadian Network Operations).
eet.com
1997 - EMC reorganizes Mcdata into a Fibre Channel company. ESCON sales peaked.
3/04/98 - Mcdata vs Brocade patent infringement lawsuit
3/20/98 - Brocade vs Mcdata counter lawsuit
4/14/98 - Settlement Agreement
4/27/99 - Effective Date of 2 year licensing agreement with specific conditions for one-year extensions and automatic 3-month EOL (end of life) rollovers.
4/27/01 - End of 2-year licensing agreement. Data-center EOL (end of life) rules to take effect.
Notes:
1) IBM developed ESCON in 1991 for its S390 mainframe product line, which is widely acknowledged to be the original SAN environment. IBM chose Mcdata as its exclusive ESCON Director Switch supplier in 1994. EMC acquired Mcdata in late 1995. EMC surpassed IBM in mainframe storage in 1996.
2) By 1996, the SSA (IBM) vs FC (everybody) standards war was winding down with IBM and Seagate both agreeing to fold elements from both standards in the ANSI FC standard. IBM, however, continued to sell SSA to its mainframe installed base until it fully embraced FC in 1999.
3) Per IDC, 25% of all SAN revenues in 2001 will come from ESCON/FICON computing environments.
From Mcdata's prospectus:
FICON Bridge. We designed and manufacture the FICON feature card within IBM's 9032 Model 5 Director that functions as a bridge between FICON and ESCON protocols. FICON is designed to provide fibre channel connectivity to
mainframe storage devices. FICON takes advantage of the American National Standards Institute fibre channel standard transport with the introduction of IBM's performance-enhancing S/390 layer. The FICON Bridge card helps provide customers with investment protection for currently installed ESCON control units, such as disk storage and tape control units.
4) Technology roadmap from the prospectus:
TECHNOLOGY
We have developed ASIC technology that serves as the foundation for the development of a complete family of SAN products. Our ASICs provide building blocks at the circuit level for implementing fibre channel switches. These ASICs
combine a number of fibre channel functions in a single chip that substantially reduces the number of components needed in our fibre channel switches. Our years of design expertise in fibre channel technology and large scale switching solutions allows us to deploy high availability SAN fabrics.
These ASICs are used in our next generation switch products, which are currently undergoing testing. The implementation of our new switch architecture is based on a common hardware and software design. The architecture enables product designs that span the high-end and mid-range storage computing environments with gigabit performance and 24x7 operation. Our technology allows us to offer switches with a higher number of data transmission ports per switch than similarly sized products with fewer ports.
Switches with fewer ports must be networked together to provide the same number of available ports. Our comparatively high number of available ports per switch allows our switches to offer higher performance than switches that must be networked together because none of our switch ports needs to be diverted to network to other switches, which degrades overall performance of the switch.
Our next generation switch enables a fabric to scale beyond 8000 ports. In addition to the support for full duplex 1.0625 gigabits per second ports at very low latencies, generally indicating a two micro-second or less delay in the data throughput speed of a switch, the design supports transmission of up to 2.125 gigabits per second and in the future will support transmission of up to 10 gigabits per second.
We expect that our next generation of switch products will include the following characteristics:
- system status monitoring;
- ability to automatically replace faulty internal component parts without interruption of data transmission through the switch;
- non-disruptive serviceability;
- component failure detection and reporting;
- user friendly operation;
- automated call home facilities;
- network management that supports both in-band and out-of-band systems; and
- management via our Enterprise Fabric Connectivity Manager software management products.
Our software product architecture is based on a McDATA-developed embedded real-time operating system which provides state-of-the-art characteristics. Coupled with hardware architecture, the software design delivers fibre channel services for the entire family of SAN products, using a single, common code image. |
