Stories about: Brocade

In terms of significant announcements, 2008 did not disappoint in Ethernet switching: Juniper entered the market, Cisco unveiled its next-generation platform, and other major vendors consolidated. It will be hard for 2009 to match. Here's a countdown of the top 10 stories for the year soon to pass.

This year's Storage Networking World Europe show focused attention on Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE). However, while SAN vendors promoted FCoE as a way to extend Fibre Channel's reach and longevity, skeptics described it as unnecessary -- and perhaps even a Cisco-powered Trojan horse intended to wipe out rival networking supplier Brocade Communications.

Do hundreds of gallons of used vegetable oil belong anywhere near a data center, let alone inside? Phil Nail thinks so.

Even though strides are being made to define standards for extending Ethernet to handle data center applications, these advances will not be a panacea, vendors say.

There's an age-old choice in IT -- whether to adopt a "best of breed" strategy for the power and flexibility it can bring, or go with a single vendor for accountability and simplicity. J. Craig Venter Institute Inc. (JCVI) believes in best of breed. The genomic research company runs Linux, Unix, Windows and Mac OS in its data center. For storage, it draws on technology from EMC, NetApp, Isilon, DataDomain and Symantec.

NASA's Infrared Processing and Analysis Center wasn't shooting for the stars when it turned to virtualization to meet its storage needs. IPAC's cash-strapped effort to record images of our universe -- up to 30 million objects captured each night and 42 billion records over the life of the project -- required big storage capabilities, and the engineers needed them fast and at a low cost.

Brocade Communications Systems is painting itself as the alternative to Cisco Systems that IT administrators have been looking for.

The 12th Black Hat conference convened at Caesar's Palace last week, where the 4,500 attendees (a 12.5 per cent increase over last year) heard about the security problems that will plague virtualized environments, why Cisco routers are more of a hacker target than ever and a detailed explanation of DNS attacks.

Will infrastructure virtualization sweep away existing switching structures while failing to grant benefits of performance, cost or improved security? Some say yes.

With the momentum Juniper Networks currently is enjoying and the availability of an executive like Microsoft's Kevin Johnson, the time was right for Chairman and CEO Scott Kriens to give up day-to-day operations.

Traditionally, network transport has run on two separate technologies, FC (Fibre Channel) and Ethernet, which, like two railroads with different gauges, seemed bound to never meet.