VirtualInstruments

Why Isn’t Brocade Putting Its Customers’ Interest First?

After three years of partnering with VI to help improve the performance and availability of the largest and most mission-critical SANs on the planet, Brocade has announced its intention to compete with us.  Although this is a great validation of the essential need for VirtualWisdom within the Brocade customer base, the tactics Brocade is using to discourage their customers from deploying VirtualWisdom borders on anti-competitive, if not monopolistic, behavior.

For years, Brocade and VI sales and services personnel have worked together in many accounts to help identify and resolve SAN and storage problems that Brocade couldn’t resolve themselves.  In every situation, we resolved the problem, identified potential future problems, and helped the customer regain confidence in the Brocade products.  I guess we were a little too successful as Brocade now recognizes the need for solutions like VirtualWisdom and has desires to bring out similar capabilities over the coming years.   In an effort to create fear and uncertainty within its customer base, Brocade has recently issued several technical support bulletins that are implying VI products may cause “fabric compatibility issues” or performance issues with their switches.  This is simply not true.

The overwhelming majority of VI customers deploy VirtualWisdom with Brocade switches and directors, which not surprisingly, reflects their market share in the FC SAN market.  If you look at all of our customers, VirtualWisdom software is deployed across HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS of Fiber Channel switch ports, and TENS OF THOUSANDS of storage targets are instrumented with our SANInsight TAPs and Performance Probe hardware devices.  To our knowledge, not a single device is experiencing any interoperability or performance issues due to VI products. The reality is just the opposite; we dramatically improve the reliability and performance of FC SANs.

We encourage Brocade to be honest with our mutual customers and recognize the critical and unique value that VI brings to enterprise FC SAN deployments.  We continue to be open to the idea of partnering with Brocade to address customer’s performance and availability challenges.  But, given their recent actions, this might be challenging. For our current and future customers, you can rest assured that we will continue to help you maximize the performance and availability of your SANs, virtualized and evolving private cloud infrastructure.