"The customer said, 'This is bullshit. IBM -- go fix it,' " according to an industry source, who did not wish to be identified.
As a result, IBM gave Brocade and QLogic their marching orders. "We have encouraged our partners to work together to solve this customer request," says Rob Sauerwalt, senior product manager of blade architecture at IBM.
However, QLogic's implementation of Brocade's native mode doesn't completely work yet, according to our source. "There are a couple of niggling things," he says. But based on the positive customer feedback from its work with QLogic, Brocade is now "actively working in the background" with other vendors, including Cisco and McData, to allow their switches to work natively with Brocade gear, he says.
Has Brocade finally seen the light? Or is it being dragged to the interoperability table against its will?
If the company is, in fact, "actively working" to improve its interoperability with other vendors, it would be a notable change from its attitude even as recently as this spring, when it refused to participate in a switch demo at Storage Networking World in Phoenix. "We are not seeing that much demand for multivendor fabrics among customers today," a Brocade spokeswoman said in March (see Brocade Snubs Multivendor Demo). Enter a disgruntled financial customer with just such a demand, and -- presto! -- Brocade is singing a different tune.
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