Brocade reportedly up for sale; is Oracle serious enough to buy them?

Switch vendor Brocade is reportedly looking for prospective buyers. HP and Oracle are named as interested parties; the Wall Street Journal that first reported this doesn’t provide much additional information about why this particular moment was chosen too look for buyers. Seeking Alpha thinks the timing isn’t that good, and that they should finish integrating their Foundry Networks acquisition first.

But the timing might be better than they think; I personally feel that this will finally show whether or not Oracle is serious about continuing Sun’s hardware business. With everybody moving their storage to either Fibre Channel or an ethernet-based protocol (iSCSI or FCoE), having a strong lineup of switches to complement your storage portfolio is important.

Sun currently has no switching products for either ethernet or Fibre Channel. Their only serious switch is an Infiniband switch (a mighty impressive one, but it’s just a single product). So if Oracle is serious about storage, I expect them to buy Brocade, or at least make a serious offer.

Sun Datacenter InfiniBand Switch 648

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4. Sun F5100 finally appears