Brocade’s Rise to Storage and Networking Fame
1995 – Brocade Communications Systems founded.
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2000 – HP signs an OEM agreement with Brocade to resell its SilkWorm 2800 Fibre Channel fabric switch as the connectivity framework for the HP Open SAN Initiative.
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2003 – Brocade buys storage fabric switch maker Rhapsody Networks for $175 million.
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2005 – Brocade buys SAN management software company Therion Software Corp., for $9.3 million in cash.
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2006 – Brocade Acquires NuView, a provider of network attached storage software, for $60 million.
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2007 – Brocade’s core products and market focused on Fibre Channel connections for storage area networks is estimated to be worth nearly $2 billion.
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2007 – Brocade completes acquisition of McData Corp. for $973 million. The deal is estimated by Dell’Oro group to give Brocade a 69 percent share of the market for storage area network switches against Cisco’s 26 percent.
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2007 – Brocade acquires Silverback Networks for an undisclosed sum. Silverback was a developer of network processors to accelerate speed and performance of storage traffic in networked storage environments.
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2008 – Brocade acquires Ethernet LAN company, Foundry Networks, for $2.6 billion.
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April 2009 – IBM announces that it will resell Brocade routers and switches to its enterprise customers under its own brand. The deal is viewed as a defensive move by the companies against Cisco’s “Unified Computing” data center strategy. It sets off a wave of similar deals by Brocade with other companies.
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August 2009 – Brocade announces an OEM reseller relationship with NetApp to resell three new Brocade products – a switch, blade and converged network adapters.
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September 2009 – Brocade and Dell form partnership that enables channel partners to resell their joint data center solutions.
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October 2009 – Brocade quietly puts itself on the market. Analysts speculate likely suitors are HP, IBM and Oracle. Oracle says it’s not interested.