As a matter of company policy, we will not comment directly on Mr. Reyes’ case.  Brocade has already resolved these matters on behalf of the company and we remain focused on running our business.

In my February blog I described how Brocade IP products will form the scalable network backbone at the new Brocade San Jose campus. Similarly, Brocade IT is using the build-out to upgrade our Storage Area Network (SAN), using the latest Brocade products and services to meet the demands of ballooning data growth and server virtualization.

The new campus will include dual SAN cores featuring Brocade DCX Backbones along with Brocade 5100 edge devices and embedded SAN switch devices in every blade-server chassis. Increasing Inter-Switch Link (ISL) throughput to 8 Gbps Fibre Channel will reduce our cabling and patch requirements and lower the number of potential failure points. We will manage and monitor all SAN equipment through the Brocade Data Center Fabric Manager (DCFM) Enterprise product.

Brocade DCX Backbone                           Brocade 5100 Switch

We are considering SAN virtualization for both campus migration activities and a more general deployment within the San Jose campus and the Broomfield, Colorado data centers. We plan to migrate the existing SAN storage from our three current San Jose data centers and integrate it into the campus infrastructure to form several aggregated storage pools. Non-blade server builds for the campus will be using Brocade 815 Host Bus Adapters (HBAs) to provide redundant 8 Gbps links into the dual-fabric SAN. In addition, the Brocade Global Services organization is working with the campus IT team to evaluate the full range of migration options and identify activities where they can augment IT resources.

                     Brocade 815 HBA

Our solutions and architecture teams are also reviewing SAN virtualization products from Brocade OEM partners. In Q4FY09, we deployed SAN storage supporting Hyper-V virtualization in Broomfield, and 35 percent of the company’s Broomfield Windows SAN capacity migrated onto this new storage. We added capacity in Q1FY10, to enable migrations of Exchange and SQL*Server data.

In Q4FY09, we also added UNIX and Windows virtualization capacity to support the SOA and upcoming Knowledge Base projects. And earlier this year we added virtual server capacity to support the Business Intelligence applications and the future Online Self-Service application, which gives Brocade customers greater ability to create cases and view service requests. That’s important because demand for self-service technology solutions has never been greater, and by empowering our customers to manage their own technology requests, we’re better able to serve them and keep costs under control. Whenever possible, we’re leveraging Brocade technology to facilitate those opportunities.

Thanks for your continued interest in Brocade IT’s role and contributions at the new Brocade Bay Area campus. If you missed one of my earlier posts, they’re all archived on the Wingspan blog homepage. I hope you’ll check back next month, when I’ll focus on the engineering applications at the new campus.

As expected, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) this week submitted its proposal to Congress outlining a plan to increase the quality and the quantity of broadband connections here in the United States. By doing so, the United States is following on the heels of countries such as Singapore and Australia who have already adopted national broadband plans to increase broadband usage in their countries.

As a CEO of a networking company, my position on the broadband plan is not as clear as it might seem. There is no doubt that I would view any plan that increases the use of networking technologies and possibly accelerates the upgrade cycles of networking hardware and software as a good thing. However, some of my best customers, particularly those in the service provider industry, may have some serious reservations and concerns about further regulation of their business by the federal government. I must weigh both views in formulating my own opinions.

But, putting aside commercial interests, I believe that this is the time for the private sector to partner with the public sector to help not only create a national plan for broadband but to put the plan into motion. In addition, I believe there are at least two other areas that the private and public sectors can partner on (specifically in corporate tax and educations reforms) that will help keep the United States as the world’s leader in innovation, a position that is arguably more tenuous than it has been in more than 150 years.

This was the basis of a recent speech I delivered to an audience full of fellow CEOs and captains-of-industry. In it, I outlined a three-step proposal that the US should adopt to keep our competitive edge especially compared to countries in emerging regions that are less burdened with legacy technology infrastructures and regulatory structures than we are. Specifically, I called for action on these three areas:

• One, work with the federal government and develop a sensible national broadband plan.
• Two, introduce comprehensive corporate tax reforms that will result in more US exports of technology and encourage more R&D investments.
• Three, increase our investment in educating our students in math and sciences through whatever means including overhauling our arcane public education system.

I have posted a complete copy of the presentation with notes below. You can download the full file by clicking on the icon. I would greatly appreciate to hear back from you with your thoughts – good, bad or indifferent – on my proposal. I hope to inspire a healthy dialogue on the three areas of action and to foster collaboration among businesses and the federal government to help get the U.S. recapture its history of innovation and economic leadership.

Thank you,

Mike

Having studied in the U.K., I was taught to say “Capital” and “Small” letters to refer to what my U.S. colleagues often call “Upper Case” and “Lower Case” letters. Apparently this nomenclature is left over from the era of manual typesetters who kept majuscule (bet you’d never heard that) letters in the upper type case, whilst keeping the more often used minuscule letters in the lower type case.

But for this write-up, I will shamelessly and purposefully use the term “Capital” as a double entendre. Capital is so integral to the DNA of CIOs, the lead point of interaction with a large percentage of our customer base, that they write their own titles out in all caps. But Capital plays another important role. When CIOs like you can demonstrate a 30-50 percent savings in overall IT and capital spending….impactful 1:1 meetings with other Capitally-acronymed people, e.g., CEOs, become not only possible but likely.

Brocade helps CIOs instigate these meeting invitations. We know that you’ve been warning your CEO for a while now on why you need to upgrade your infrastructure. You see the tidal wave of inundating and ever-growing data and network traffic looming. You realize that your bandwidth capabilities are at sea-level and you’ve been sounding the alarm but no one’s coming. There’s nothing like a Capital savings discussion to get all the oars “converging” in the right direction.

Let us help you with the Capital in CIO. Brocade knows you’re drowning and can get you to shore safely – not with a slow-moving mammoth of a boat like the Queen Mary (no offense to my home country’s beloved former queen), but with a navy seal speedboat ready to help you ride the infrastructure upgrade wave.

Once there, what you do is up to you. Now if the CEO meeting turns into a round of golf….better call the competition….they spend a lot more time than we do perfecting their game.

The phenomenal growth of the healthcare industry over the last few years in Asia has received plenty of attention in local and global markets. To meet the surging demand for high-quality healthcare, coupled with an increasing need to conform to global standards in delivery and management, healthcare service providers across most developed and developing economies of the region are quickly upgrading their IT infrastructures.

I recently saw a couple of healthcare studies from Springboard Research, where it estimated that the total Healthcare IT market in Asia (excluding Japan) is expected to hit US$4.8 billion this year. If the healthcare industry has been saving for the rainy day, then guess what … it’s raining hard!

Back in the mid 1990’s, before someone coined the term “medical tourism,” that concept was known as the international patient business. Travelling internationally to seek healthcare in Asia is very much a norm among the wealthy in the developing nations! What has changed is that demand has now cascaded to include the very large middle class in those countries! Today, we are beginning to see innovative offerings such as medical treatment and procedures on board cruise ships, using on-board facilities that enable patients to recuperate while cruising and relaxing at sea!

Demand drives competition and competition drives differentiation and therefore innovation. Developed nations in Asia and the healthcare providers within them have greatly increased their spending on technologies for medical and diagnostic equipment, care management and patient records, and are now investing in value-added applications to support this IT infrastructure, regulatory requirements and client privacy. Such was the case for Asian Hospital and Medical Center in the Philippines that recently adopted an AMALGA Hospital Information System from Microsoft to support the conversion from paper-driven manual processes to a fully automated environment—to ensure accuracy of data capture, lessen manual transcription in the transfer of patient data and minimize errors in medical results.

Even after patients return home from treatment in many facilities, physicians can continue to communicate with them electronically. For instance, hospitals in Singapore can upload medical-grade images and procedure records as required for continued care and treatment in their home country. By seamlessly linking electronic health record systems (EHRs) to share information across a broad network of providers, this approach provides international collaboration known as “patients beyond borders.” This type of collaboration depends on reliable, high-performance IP networking solutions that Brocade is very well positioned to deliver today!

Brocade – Enabling Healthcare Connectivity and Data Center Efficiency
Any hospital network infrastructure is only as robust as its weakest link. A reliable, distributed, scalable and secured wired and wireless network infrastructure is required for connecting a hospital campus to a wide variety of devices, including laptops, workstations, nurses call stations, equipment tracking for patient diagnostics and administrative/record-keeping functions.

Brocade, in partnership with Motorola, ShoreTel, IBM Security and McAfee, is ready to help healthcare providers meet these requirements while aggressively reducing their Operating expenses. Brocade has a proven history of providing high-quality network infrastructure in thousands of mission-critical data centers around the world. As a result, it can leverage that experience to help healthcare providers scale up to the stringent performance and security expectations of modern medical facilities!

It’s nine o’clock on a Saturday night and the regular crowd is standing in line at the coffee shop ordering lattes, Frappuccinos and mochas. I’m here, but I’m not supposed to be here. Normally, I’d be on the other side of the country, but my flight was canceled due to inclement weather. Between the heavy rain in the West and the heavy snow in the East, my scheduled flight, well, couldn’t fly.

All this precipitation started me thinking about how we look to the formation of clouds for answers to questions about the weather—and how companies looking to deliver services from the Clouds also ask about Whether.

I started fielding “Whether” questions in the late 1990s. I guess you can say I became something of a Whetherman. Several months before the century gave way to the Y2K issue, I left behind years of technology management on Wall Street and joined a start-up company based in Waltham, Massachusetts. The premise behind StorageNetworks was simple: deliver storage as a service over a “wire.” Our customers would subscribe to capacity that would be delivered (provisioned) within the constraints of an SLA. The model worked and many companies (large and small) leveraged the service to meet the growing data demands of the dot-com era.

StorageNetworks essentially provided a cloud service. We didn’t call it cloud at the time, but that’s what it was. We owned the assets and provisioned parcels of storage to customers who in many cases shared common infrastructure. We provided storage services from public and private data centers. We met with companies ranging in size from dot-com start-ups to established enterprises. There was little doubt we could deliver cloud storage. Actually, the responses mostly ranged from excitement to curiosity. But, in the same way a low cloud ceiling keeps planes on the tarmac, Whether kept many customers from taking off into early cloud storage.

The customers always wondered Whether they should do it. Whether services would be responsive to their business needs. Whether the right levels of data security would be applied. Whether the infrastructure would be available 24×7×365. Whether subscribing to resources would keep them competitive. Whether the subscription model would truly reduce costs compared to an ownership model. Whether they were headed toward vendor lock-in. Whether they could trust it.

In the late 1990s the Internet was less than a decade old, cell phones called home instead of calling up home pages, a sales force was something you had (not something you used) and Twitter wasn’t tweeting. A lot has changed since then. The pervasiveness of cloud services today for consumers and professionals has reduced the resistance to placing digital assets beyond arm’s length. But the ubiquity of the cloud for end users has only raised more questions about Whether for those providing cloud services.

The bottom line is that end users expect applications to be available, period. No excuses. So providers have a wide range of Whether-related issues to contend with, such as:
• Whether they can handle an unanticipated deluge of requests
• Whether they can mitigate morphing security threats
• Whether they should expand infrastructure to support customer growth

• Whether the infrastructure is reliable enough to meet availability SLAs

For service providers this means building physical cloud infrastructures with the most reliable, efficient and high-performance technology.

When I was responsible for early public and private storage clouds, we leveraged Brocade technology to meet many of these Whether challenges. Today, the next generation of Brocade data center technologies is simplifying the boundaries between SAN, LAN and application delivery. These products are designed to meet the growing demands on physical infrastructure, virtualized infrastructure and applications. Our goal at Brocade is to help our customers think less about the Whether by providing them with the networking reliability and scalability to meet their business demands.

Well, it’s cloudy weather today in the Bay Area but, as I sit here in Starbucks with Wi-Fi and 3G, I have no doubt Whether it’s cloudy everywhere. Ah, you gotta love a hot latte and the Netflix instant play queue to make being stranded feel almost like home.