Slashdot Mirror
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.
It says for 5 years, which doesn't mean after 5 years
based on that other article, if you were in Florida, I'd challenge your reading comprehension classes
until the new owner doesn't
It does not say, "regulatory oversight after five years," but rather, " regulatory oversight for five years after the deal is completed." For five years after finialising the deal they will be subject to oversight from the regulator. Whether such oversight has any teeth is a separate issue: anything the company does not agree with will be litigated until the five years expires.
Patent litigation: A doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction... in which everyone seems willing to push the button
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.
they will be subject to oversight from the regulator
If Cisco upper management has any sense, they've started looking for a new source of chip designs.
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
It doesn't say AFTER five years. It says FOR five years AFTER the deal completes.
Reading comprehension ftw.
Which were easy to spot, since they were full of chinks...
*ducks*
when someone gets tempted to make extra profits by violating the agreement quietly. Self-Regulation on something that potentailly reduces profit is kinda like a child telling your mother to leave the cookie jar in their reach after he/she promises they will only have one a day after diner. Unless this is one amazing kid, sooner or later they will be tempted to have, "just one more" after lunch or as a snack, or after breakfast. "It's harmless, who will notice"? Some 3-8 cookies a day, 1-2 month later, with signs of unhealthy weight gain the parent wonders where it came from. Deals like this are just begging to be broken.
"Imagination is more important than knowledge" - Einstein
But... but... free market?
Why is the US government protecting the monopoly that is Cisco?
I hope they fire a particular person from their marketing... but it's probably already done.
I was waiting for a super important call (read: production is down, four levels of management in my office, SevMax ticket open with support that costs USD 500k+/year that is going to call you back immediately promise promise), and I get this gal peddling Broadcom. I tell her sorry-I-don't-have-time-and-I'm-not-the-right-contact-for-network-equipment-in-any-case-goodbye. Thirty seconds later the phone rings again and a different girl wants to know if I am Lorens (duh) and then says Well you hung up on my colleague, that's not nice, we can hang up too - click.
Several years later that's all I can think of when I hear the name Broadcom.
At least the four levels of management in my office got some comic relief from the speakerphone, and one of them was the boss-boss of the guy who would have been the right contact for peddling network equipment (of which he probably bought maybe $1M/year)... we never did buy any Broadcom.
I think the OP's point was, that they can play nice for 5 years while the oversight is in place, but then after 5 years, they could do whatever they want with no oversight.
WTB [sig], PST!!!