This is really funny. Brocade is one of the sleaziest young companies that I have ever had the perverse pleasure of watching. After loudly proclaiming that it was the next Cisco, it promptly got into a brawl with....Cisco. Now here's Brocade's latest antic.
In March 2002, Brocade paid Meier to test its much-delayed 2Gbps 12000 switch against Mcdata's 1Gbps director at 1Gbps. Now, this was remarkably naive on McData's part considering Brocade's previous attempt at rigging benchmark tests against Vixel and Q-Logic/Ancor. Not surprisingly, Mcdata's director came out on top in terms of reliability but it was generally outperformed by Brocade's new switch which was based on newer ASICS. As a result, Network World named the 12000 as its Product of the year.
nwfusion.com
After HDS announced that it was immediately reselling the 12000, IBM and EMC weighed in with their own warnings about the 12000.
EMC's Caveats on Brocade 12000
byteandswitch.com
IBM on Brocade's 12000: Not Quite
byteandswitch.com
In the June 2002 rematch, Mcdata's 2Gbps totally outclassed Brocade's 12000 switch. McData finally came to its senses and brought its 2Gbps directors to the tests. Meier used the same set of tests in the Brocade-sponsored test and the McData-sponsored test.
.....In the case of the McData Intrepid 6064, there was no indication of blocking, whereas the Brocade 12000 demonstrated blocking in several configurations," Miercom wrote in its analysis, dated July 31. "In many of the test cases, the 12000 reaches maximum throughput due to blocking at 70 percent line load, and is unable to deliver any additional throughput as the load increases......"
..........On Miercom's "cold reboot" test, in which the power cable to a switch is disconnected and then reconnected, McData's 6064 restarted in 1 minute, 56.7 seconds, while the 12000 took 10 minutes, 11.7 seconds. And when the firm tested code load and activation, McData again came out in front. The 6064 did not cause any disruptions in traffic, while upgrading Brocade's 12000 caused 22 seconds of downtime, according to the firm.
byteandswitch.com
What did Brocade do in return to contain the expected damage? Amazingly, it issued a script to its sales force to tell them that it couldn't even get McData's sixth generation director to work at all!!!!! This is a sign of desperation. Reyes, obviously, had to give his salespeople something, anything, to counteract the results of the latest tests as well as stories like these circulating around the industry.
The Brocade 12000 still doesn't work as advertised. Problems continue at more than four sites that we know about. Seems the company wasn't quite ready to release when it did, and now the big OEMs have all sent out their letters to customers to warn them. EMC even makes people sign a waiver before installing the unit, saying that they understand that a very small amount of configuration options are tolerated, and that if they deviate at all, EMC is out of the loop. This after IBM sent a similar message last month.
August 2002
storagemagazine.techtarget.com
Word is that Merrill Lynch gave Brocade a hard order for 40 of the new 12000 boxes - at $250,000 each, and we understand that there could be 60 more behind this one. I guess they didn't order them from IBM, since IBM poo-poo'ed the 12000 in a recent internal report
Compaq has an RFP on the street code-named Atlas for a next generation switching platform with enough real smarts to run their VersaStor virtualization code. It seems Brocade is panicking, since it doesn't have the smarts in its switches to meet the spec. Judging by how many switches Compaq ships, this is a big win for whoever gets it.
June 2002
storagemagazine.techtarget.com |
