Paul H. Mansky, an analyst with ThinkEquity Partners, says the new Cisco switches may have a disproportionate impact on Brocade Communications Systems Inc. (Nasdaq: BRCD), which is currently the market leader in Fibre Channel fabric switches.
"We believe Cisco is positioning their new fabric switch offerings to compete on a price basis with Brocade's SilkWorm 3900 and 3800, which we believe have been the company's workhorse over the past several quarters," he writes in a research note.
For McData Corp. (Nasdaq: MCDTA), meanwhile, Mansky says its Sphereon 4000 series has a "meaningful bill of materials advantage" over both Brocade's and Cisco's due to use of a single application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) and the ability to add capacity in four-port increments (see McData Lowers Boom on Brocade and McData Swings Switches Lower).
"Although not entirely immune should Cisco use 'account-acquisition' pricing, we believe McData's competency in director-class products and their growing share in fabric switches currently has the company at a superior long-term competitive position versus Brocade," Mansky writes.
Both the Cisco switches are one rack unit (1U) high and support both 1- and 2-Gbit/s Fibre Channel connectivity. The company says customers can use the MDS 9100 series switches to build small to midsized SANs or to provide "edge-to-core" connectivity into larger SANs. The switches include integrated management tools and network services already available on the other Cisco MDS 9000 products, including Virtual SANs (VSANs), virtual output queuing, and diagnostic reporting.
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