Friday, June 1, 2007

Brocade Enters HBA Market

San Jose-based Brocade, a developer of Fibre Channel switches and other storage networking products, said Thursday that it has entered into the host bus adapter market. The company said that it is rolling out a new family of host bus adapters for the iSCSI and Fibre Channel market. The major shift in the firm's strategy puts Brocade head to head with its traditional HBA partners, including Emulex and QLogic. The firm said that by adding server connectivity products, it will be positioned to address broader data center requirements for its enterprise customers. The new products include an iSCSI Initiator HBA, used for connecting servers to storage via Ethernet, and a line of 4 Gbit/sec Fibre Channel HBAs.