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It's worth noting, on the Cisco fabric switch side, that they offer a
feature that Brocade does not but that's increasingly attractive for FC-attached
tape: in-stream encryption without having to use a pass-through device (like
Decru, now owned by NetApp, sells) and without having to use tape drives that do
that job themselves (LTO-4). The whole "where to do tape backup encryption"
question is a huge can of worms (fun religious topics I'd really rather not
argue about: ability to migrate keys to another system, comparison of various
products' key management functionality), but if it's something you want to do
and not something you already do (cf, key migration: short version is that there
isn't a good way), it's worth considering if you're building out new tape
fabric.
--
gabriel rosenkoetter
Radian Group
Inc, Unix/Linux/VMware Sysadmin / Backup &
Recovery
gabriel.rosenkoetter AT radian DOT biz, 215 231 1556
On Wed, Feb 27, 2008 at 10:49 AM, Shai Harmelin <shai.harmelin AT isilon DOT com>
wrote:
I'm curious if you
or anyone on the list can provide some guidance into who are the 3 main SAN
switch vendors and who are the 3 main tape library vendors in the enterprise
market and how big is their cumulative market share
respectively.
I'll talk to the switch side of things - as a customer, not a
vendor. Brocade has traditionally been (by far) the largest edge switch
vendor. McData is/was 2nd, and then Qlogic. Brocade has since bought
out McData. Qlogic edge switches go into sites where the customers want to
do things very cheaply. It's not that the switches are all that bad
because I haven't heard that if they are - it's that Qlogic has to compete on
price because of the Brocade dominance.
On the director side, McData had
the numbers for the longest time but Brocade was catching up fast. Before
the merger, it was roughly a 1/3, 1/3, 1/3 split between Brocade, McData, and
Cisco. Brocade now has 2/3 of the market.
From what I
hear, Cisco directors go into sites that are already Cisco shops (or educational
institutions that pay a fraction of what commercial customers pay) and at which
the network groups manage the SAN. Brocade goes into just about everywhere
else.
If you're an HP shop, you're adding Brocade gear by default.
They sold the McData switches as an afterthought and now sell Cisco gear, but
they'll always push Brocade first. For EMC, it was traditionally McData
all the way - after all, McData was spun off of EMC in the first place. I
don't know what they're doing now - their spec sheets on the "Connectrix" line
lists the Brocade equivalents first and then Cisco.
.../Ed
--
Ed Wilts, Mounds View, MN, USA
mailto:ewilts AT ewilts DOT org
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