Brocade was an American technology company specializing in storage networking products, now a subsidiary of Broadcom Inc. The company is known for its Fibre Channel storage networking products and technology. Prior to the acquisition, the company expanded into adjacent markets including a wide range of IP/Ethernet hardware and software products. Offerings included routers and network switches for data center, campus and carrier environments, IP storage network fabrics; Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) and software-defined networking (SDN) markets such as a commercial edition of the OpenDaylight Project controller; and network management software that spans physical and virtual devices.
On November 2, 2016, Singapore-based chip maker Broadcom Limited announced it was buying Brocade for about $5.5 billion. As part of the acquisition, Broadcom divested all of the IP networking hardware and software-defined networking assets. Broadcom has since re-domesticated to the United States and is now known as Broadcom Inc.
History
Brocade was founded in August 1995, by Seth Neiman (a venture capitalist, a former executive from Sun Microsystems and a professional auto racer), Kumar Malavalli (a co-author of the Fibre Channel specification) and Paul R. Bonderson (a former executive from Intel Corporation and Sun). Neiman became the first CEO of the company. Brocade was incorporated on May 14, 1998, in Delaware.
The company's first product, SilkWorm, which was a Fibre Channel switch, was released in early 1997.
On May 25, 1999, the company went public at a split-adjusted price of $4.75. On initial public offering (IPO), the company offered 3,250,000 shares, with an additional 487,500 shares offered to the underwriters to cover over-allotments. The top three underwriters (based on number of shares) for Brocade's IPO were, in order, Morgan Stanley Dean Witter, BT Alex.Brown, and Dain Rauscher Wessels. Brocade stock is traded in the National Market System of the NASDAQ GS stock market under the ticker symbol BRCD. The second generation of switches was announced in 1999.
On January 14, 2013, Brocade named Lloyd Carney as new chief executive. On November 2, 2016, Singapore-based chip maker Broadcom Limited announced they were buying Brocade for $5.5 billion. As part of the announcement, Broadcom said they would sell Brocade's networking business to avoid competing with its top customers such as Cisco Systems.
On August 8, 2017, Brocade announced that its SDN technology had been spun off as a new company called Lumina Networks. This follows the sales of other divisions designed to allow the Broadcom acquisition to proceed, including Ruckus Wireless, Connectem (), Virtual ADC, Vyatta & , and Brocade's data center networking business.
Broadcom announced the acquisition of Brocade in Nov 2016, and it completed the acquisition in Nov 2017 for $5.5 billion.
Products
Brocade focuses on Fibre Channel and FICON storage area network (SAN) directors and switches; SAN extension switches (FCIP), embedded switches for blade servers, optical transceivers and SAN management software.
Prior to the acquisition by Broadcom, Brocade also provided ultra-low-latency data center switches; Ethernet fabrics, Federal and enterprise Ethernet (LAN/WLAN) switches; WAN (Internet) routers; application delivery controllers (load balancers); embedded Ethernet switch blades; Fibre Channel host bus adapters (HBAs); converged Fibre Channel/Ethernet network adapters (CNAs), and Ethernet transceivers. Other hardware from Brocade support common protocols including iSCSI, Gigabit Ethernet, FCoE, DCB/CEE, and Layer 4-7 networking protocols.
Brocade also previously sold software-based networking devices including technology for SDN, Network virtualization, virtual routers, virtual firewalls, virtual Application Delivery Controllers (load balancers), network security appliances and VPNs through its wholly owned subsidiary, Vyatta.
Fibre Channel
Brocade's first Fibre Channel switch SilkWorm 1000 (SW1000) (released in 1997) was based on the "Stitch" ASIC and their own VxWorks-based firmware (Fabric OS or FOS). SilkWorm eventually came to be a long-lived marketing designation for an entire line of products, with the first product being retro-named the SilkWorm 1000 (SW1000) to distinguish it from subsequent platforms. Bruce Bergman was the CEO during most of this period. Product names were generally puns on various kinds of woven fabric, since a switched Fibre Channel network is also called a "fabric".