Broadcom Gets Green Light From Feds To Buy San Jose's Brocade For $5.9 billion (bizjournals.com) 27
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.
Re: Surely I'm not the only one who sees the probl (Score:1)
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
Re: (Score:2)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1)
It doesn't say AFTER five years. It says FOR five years AFTER the deal completes.
Reading comprehension ftw.
set up an operations "firewall" internally (Score:2)
FibreChannel can die ASAP (Score:3, Insightful)
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...
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Except that iSCSI sucks compared to fibre channel. There is a reason why FCoE required data centre bridging and if you don't understand why they you are not qualified to comment on the issue.
The price of a DCB capable network is around the same price as a FC network.
Re: FibreChannel can die ASAP (Score:2)
I've been retired for a while, but a quick Google seems to indicate that Juniper has products in this niche. If this is correct, I'm not sure why they'd be saying it is a duopoly.
Trivially related: We used a lot of Juniper kit. The feature set was on par with Cisco and the prices were much better. I have no idea how much of that remains true.
Great (Score:5, Insightful)
Another company that will require registration to get their datasheets?
"operations firewall"? Used to be "Chinese walls" (Score:2)
Which were easy to spot, since they were full of chinks...
*ducks*
The problem with such deals is... (Score:2)
Dont hurt Cisco. (Score:2)
But... but... free market?
Why??? (Score:2)
Marketing (Score:2)
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
Re: (Score:2)
Brocade, dammit, no editing your posts on Slashdot, and you probably won't believe me now... umm, let's just say that I have a psychological block against the name Broadcom^WBroadwaaaay^WBrocade^D