Brocade Communications Systems


Brocade Communications Systems, Inc., was an American technology company specializing in storage networking products, now a subsidiary of Broadcom Inc. The company is known for its Fibre Channel storage networking products and technology. Prior to the acquisition, the company expanded into adjacent markets including a wide range of IP/Ethernet hardware and software products. Offerings included routers and network switches for data center, campus and carrier environments, IP storage network fabrics; Network Functions Virtualization and software-defined networking markets such as a commercial edition of the OpenDaylight Project controller; and network management software that spans physical and virtual devices.
On November 2, 2016, Singapore-based chip maker Broadcom Limited announced it was buying Brocade for about $5.5 billion. As part of the acquisition, Broadcom divested all of the IP networking hardware and software-defined networking assets. Broadcom has since re-domesticated to the United States and is now known as Broadcom Inc.

History

Brocade was founded in August 1995, by Seth Neiman, Kumar Malavalli and Paul R. Bonderson. Neiman became the first CEO of the company. Brocade was incorporated on May 14, 1998, in Delaware.
The company's first product, SilkWorm, which was a Fibre Channel switch, was released in early 1997.
On May 25, 1999, the company went public at a split-adjusted price of $4.75. On initial public offering, the company offered 3,250,000 shares, with an additional 487,500 shares offered to the underwriters to cover over-allotments. The top three underwriters for Brocade's IPO were, in order, Morgan Stanley Dean Witter, BT Alex.Brown, and Dain Rauscher Wessels.
Brocade stock is traded in the National Market System of the NASDAQ GS stock market under the ticker symbol BRCD.
The second generation of switches was announced in 1999.
On January 14, 2013, Brocade named Lloyd Carney as new chief executive.
On November 2, 2016, Singapore-based chip maker Broadcom Limited announced they were buying Brocade for $5.5 billion. As part of the announcement, Broadcom said they would sell Brocade's networking business to avoid competing with its top customers such as Cisco Systems.
On August 8, 2017, Brocade announced that its SDN technology had been spun off as a new company called Lumina Networks. This follows the sales of other divisions designed to allow the Broadcom acquisition to proceed, including Ruckus Wireless, Connectem, Virtual ADC, Vyatta &, and Brocade's data center networking business.
Broadcom announced the acquisition of Brocade in Nov 2016, and it completed the acquisition in Nov 2017 for $5.5 billion.

Products

Brocade focuses on Fibre Channel and FICON storage area network directors and switches; SAN extension switches, embedded switches for blade servers, optical transceivers and SAN management software.
Prior to the acquisition by Broadcom, Brocade also provided ultra-low-latency data center switches; Ethernet fabrics, Federal and enterprise Ethernet switches; WAN routers; application delivery controllers ; embedded Ethernet switch blades; Fibre Channel host bus adapters ; converged Fibre Channel/Ethernet network adapters, and Ethernet transceivers. Other hardware from Brocade supports common protocols including iSCSI, Gigabit Ethernet, FCoE, DCB/CEE, and Layer 4-7 networking protocols.
Brocade also previously sold software-based networking devices including technology for SDN, Network virtualization, virtual routers, virtual firewalls, virtual Application Delivery Controllers, network security appliances and VPNs through its wholly owned subsidiary, Vyatta.

Fibre Channel

Brocade's first Fibre Channel switch SilkWorm 1000 was based on the "Stitch" 1 Gbit/s ASIC and their own VxWorks-based firmware. SilkWorm eventually came to be a long-lived marketing designation for an entire line of products, with the first product being retro-named the SilkWorm 1000 to distinguish it from subsequent platforms. Bruce Bergman was the CEO during most of this period. Product names were generally puns on various kinds of woven fabric, since a switched Fibre Channel network is also called a "fabric". The SilkWorm 1000 series included the SilkWorm I and II launched in 1997 with 16 ports. In 1998, the SilkWorm Express launched with 8 ports.
In 1998, Gregory Reyes joined the company as CEO. Between 1999 and 2000, Brocade launched several 1 Gbit/s switches including the SilkWorm 2800, SilkWorm 2400, SilkWorm 2250 and the SilkWorm 2050 based on the Loom ASIC. In 2001, Brocade released the SilkWorm 6400, which was designated a "director" similarly to IBM ESCON directors already well-established in the mainframe computer market. The term "director" became universally used for more expensive FC switches.
From 2001 to 2003, Brocade released switches based on its third generation ASIC, "BLOOM". BLOOM introduced increased throughput of 2 Gbit/s. Between 2001-2002 the SilkWorm 3800 and SilkWorm 3200, and SilkWorm 3900 were launched. Brocade integrated BLOOM into its first "pure" director, the SilkWorm 12000, in April 2002. The director offered up to 128 ports in two 64-port pseudo-switches. The 12000 represented several internal architecture and technical changes besides the new ASIC: it had an upgraded control processor architecture, changed the embedded operating system, and introduced the backplane architecture. The Bloom ASIC also introduced a notable capability of frame-level Fibre Channel trunking, which provided high throughput with load balancing across multiple cables. It needed to be implemented in the ASIC hardware to ensure in-order delivery of frames. Also, hot firmware upgrade was introduced with FOS v4.1 in October 2003.
At the time, Brocade's main rival, McDATA, held over 90% market share in director segment, owing to a strong position first in the ESCON market, and then in the FICON market. The SilkWorm 12000 director gained over one-third of the market share after its release in 2002. Brocade added mainframe customers with FICON and FICON CUP support on the SilkWorm 12000.
In 2004, the BLOOM II improved on the previous ASIC design by reducing its power consumption and die size, while maintaining 2 Gbit/s technology. New switches were launched including the SilkWorm 3850 and SilkWorm 3250. BLOOM II also powered Brocade's second-generation director, the SilkWorm 24000. Still a 128-port design, it was the first one which could operate as a single 128-port switch. The new director also used approximately two thirds less power than its predecessor. Brocade also introduced its first multiprotocol Fibre Channel router, the SilkWorm 7420. Brocade also acquired Rhapsody Networks. This was also the time frame in which Brocade first entered into the embedded switch market, delivering multiple switches physically integrated into other vendors' hardware, such as storage controllers and blade server chassis.
2004 also saw the introduction of 4 Gbit/s Condor-based platforms. Between 2004 and 2006, Brocade launched several switches including the 4900 4100, and 200E. The 384-port 48000 director was launched in 2005. In 2006, the second generation multiprotocol Fibre Channel router 7500 switch and FR4-18i blade for the 48000 director were launched.
In January 2008 Brocade launched the 384-port 8 Gbit/s DCX Backbone.
In May 2008, Brocade unveiled 3 new 8 Gbit/s switches: 24-port 300 switch, 40-port 5100 switch and the 80-port 5300 switch.
In January 2009, Brocade launched the 192-port 8 Gbit/s DCX-4S Backbone.
In September 2009, Brocade launched the Brocade 7800 Extension Switch and the FX8-24 Extension Blade for the DCX Backbone family for extending SANs over FCIP. They also launched the Brocade 8000 Switch and the FCOE 10-24 blade for the DCX Backbone family for FCoE SAN connectivity.
In late 2010 Brocade introduced Virtual Cluster Switching on the VDX ultra-low-latency data center switch product line. These are DCB/CEE- and TRILL-based switches, eliminating the need for Spanning Tree Protocol, and supporting multi-hop Fibre Channel over Ethernet and self-trunking.
In May 2011, Brocade launched the industry's first "Gen 5 Fibre Channel" SAN platform family including the Brocade DCX 8510 Backbone, 6510 switch and 1860 Fabric Adapter. The Brocade DCX 8510 is available in 8-slot or 4-slot chassis models supporting up to 384 16 Gbit/s ports at line-rate speeds and 8.2 terabits per second of chassis bandwidth. It includes optical UltraScale inter-chassis links which simplify scale-out design for multi-chassis architectures. The Brocade 6510 switch is a 48-port 16 Gbit/s switch designed for virtualized applications and high-performance storage including SSD arrays. Brocade also introduced the 1860 Fabric Adapter, the industry's first adapter which includes AnyIO 16 Gbit/s FC HBA, 10GbE CNA, and 10GbE NIC functionality on the same card.
In April 2012, Brocade launched the Gen 5 6505 switch entry-level switch.
In March 2013, Brocade launched the Gen 5 6520 96-port Fibre Channel high-density switch and announced Brocade Fabric Vision technology. Brocade Fabric Vision technology introduces advanced diagnostics, monitoring, and management capabilities through a combination of ASIC, FOS, and Brocade Network Advisor. New features include Brocade Monitoring and Alerting Policy Suite for fabric-wide threshold configuration and monitoring and Brocade Flow Vision for data flow monitoring and analysis.
In October 2014, Brocade launched the Gen 5 7840 extension switch and the FC16-64 64-port blade for the DCX 8510.
In March 2016, Brocade launched the G620 switch, their first Gen 6 Fibre Channel product.
In July 2016, Brocade launched the Gen 6 X6 Director with 4 slots or 8 slots and SX6 extension blade.
In March 2017, Brocade launched the Gen 6 G610 entry switch.
In April 2018, Brocade launched the Gen 6 G630 enterprise switch and FC32-64 high density blade for the X6 Director.
In December 2018, Brocade launched the Gen 6 7810 extension switch.
In September 2020, Brocade launched the X7 Director and G720 Switch, their first Gen 7 Fibre Channel products.
In February 2022, Brocade launched the Gen 7 G730 128-port switch and the 64 Gbit/s double density optical transceiver.
In August 2023, Brocade launched the Gen 7 FC64-64 64-port blade for the X7 Director and the 64 Gbit/s 7850 Extension Switch.
In January 2025, Brocade launched the Gen 7 G710 24-port entry switch.
In November 2025, Brocade launched the Gen 8 X8 Directors and G820 56-port switch.