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Broadcom Gets Green Light From Feds To Buy San Jose's Brocade For $5.9 billion (bizjournals.com)
Chipmaker Broadcom on Monday won approval from the U.S. Federal Trade Commission to purchase San Jose-based Brocade Communications Systems for $5.9 billion. From a report: To land U.S. approval, Broadcom had to promise federal regulators not to use information from the acquisition to hurt Cisco Systems. At issue with U.S. regulators was possible impacts on Cisco, since Cisco buys chips from Broadcom, but competes with Brocade. On the flip side, regulators worried Broadcom might use its position as supplier and competitor to raise the prices on fiber channel switches, a niche networking segment that's owned completely by Brocade and Cisco. To assuage those concerns, Broadcom agreed to set up an operations "firewall" internally, so that competitive information that might hurt Cisco won't be shared internally. It also agreed to submit to regulatory oversight for five years after the deal is completed.
iSCSI is the future for your block delivery over a network, and NFS/SMBv3 is where the most of the workloads are going. (I am deliverately leaving out things like HDFS, Gluster, Swift, etc).
Even though FibreChannel has a latency advantage over eth*, eth has price and speed advantages over FibreChannel. And besides, if you want low latency, Infiniband is where is at.
What's more, most VMs and databases nowadays (except a few holdouts** like oracle or VMware) recomend NAS over SAN (administrative advantages trump speed advantages). See the _latest_ manuals from Databases like MS-SQL server, DB2, Informix, Syabase (yes, it still exists), and you'll see, most recomend to put the DB on an FS instead of a raw partition nowadays...
Fibrechanel is a Duopoly (more like a 1,5poly now). The prices were high to begin with, now, they are going to go through the roof! It made sense when it debut, but nowadays, pretty much has only inertia moving it.
*And some others, yes, FibreChannel is kind of a rolls-royce, but one that not only has huge markups, but needs special roads, and specialy trained drivers
**Granted, these companies are top dogs in their trade, but, nonetheless, going the way of the IBM mainframe...
*** Suerte a todos y Feliz dia!
Another company that will require registration to get their datasheets?
Mostly random stuff.