"The response from McData engineers when I needed to support a closed-loop Fibre Channel device was, 'Well, most folks don't need to do that,' " she says. Swanson adds, "It was clear that McData didn't build a solution that met my business needs as a 24-by-7 banking operation... I rate-lock $140 million in loans per day. It's not an option to go down in the middle of the day, or to go down at all."
Asked to comment, a McData spokesman says the company recommends its 6000-series directors for high-availability SAN environments, rather than the departmental-level switch IndyMac was previously using. As for the other issues, he says, McData has since added a command-line interface and now provides support for closed-loop FC devices. In addition, the McData rep says, "there are plenty of cases where we've replaced Brocade."
But in this case, McData was shown the door. Last fall, the bank's IT group evaluated the 16-port Brocade 3800 (with the plan of migrating to the 12000 when it became available) and McData's 64-port 6064 director. In the end, Swanson says, one of the main reasons IndyMac picked Brocade's solution was its ease of management: "We found the tools and solutions offered by Brocade just made it a lot easier for my storage folks to maintain the system." The change also allowed IndyMac to replace the 4U-high McData switch with two 1U-high Brocade 3800s, which it installed in November 2001.
Earlier this year, IndyMac moved to the SilkWorm 12000, putting a pair of switches running at 2-Gbit/s in a single cabinet. Its data center includes two EMC Symmetrix boxes with a total of 16 terabytes, and several Unisys (NYSE: UIS) and Compaq servers. The bank migrated the 3800 switches to the edge of the network, and now has eight 3800s at the edge running at 1 Gbit/s.
But what about the widespread concerns that the 12000 isn't quite on a par with other director switches? Two of Brocade's biggest partners, EMC and IBM Corp. (NYSE: IBM), have separately expressed reservations to their channel partners and customers about the high-availability features of the switch (see IBM on Brocade's 12000: Not Quite and EMC's Caveats on Brocade 12000).
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