Steve,
I don't know for sure. Call it a gut feeling, but even if Sun wanted to keep the switches, I'm not sure Ancor would want them to keep them. I don't have any basis in fact for that opinion, but why give your competition a heads-up? (Any more than you already did.)
Think about what happened there. Sun was using Ancor's MKII switches extensively in their test bed, was requesting features and tweaks from Ancor, which were implemented, and then decides to go a different route as soon as Brocade is able to deliver A/L? Something doesn't seem right to me, and I don't think it has anything to do with Ancor. It sounds like Ancor was used to force the pricing and feature issues with Brocade, and to give Sun a chance to test and debug their own equipment, while waiting for an alternate choice for the technology. (Whether that is Brocade or Sun.) I don't like it, at any rate, and if I were running Ancor, I wouldn't be a happy camper over the whole thing.
Another point is that if Roy is right and Sun ends up developing their own switch internally, presumably with the help of Brocade, one of Ancor's potential CUSTOMERS then becomes a potent COMPETITOR. Why feed your competitors?
Craig |
