On Monday US time, WAN optimisation company BlueCoat acquired its ailing rival Packeteer in a deal worth $US268 million.
But ripples from the transaction have quickly reached the storage industry, with Brocade disclosing that it dissolved its relationship with Packeteer late in 2007.
Brocade had offered "Branch File Manager," a product that combined its own s StorageX file virtualization with Packeteer's WAN optimisation kit to provide remote CIFS access and replicate branch office data to a main data center.
It now seems that the product, announced in 2007, lasted only six months after failing to attract many customers.
"Brocade ... decided to end-of-life the Branch File Manager product [last November] at the same time that the company [discontinued] the WAFS product," Brocade spokeswoman Kathryn Craig wrote today in an email to SearchStorage.com. "While WAN optimisation and WAFS are complementary to Brocade's file management products, these are not solutions that play directly to Brocade's own strengths and core competencies. Brocade's strategy is to partner with WAFS and WAN optimization vendors rather than sell/provide these products as part of our own portfolio."
She said the discontinuation of Brocade WAFS was "based on the fact that the WAFS and WAN optimization markets are converging, and our customers are looking for a much broader set of functionality beyond just WAFS for remote site IT management."
Branch File Manager was withdrawn "before we had a meaningful customer base," Craig wrote, adding that "Brocade is committed to supporting our existing WAFS customer base."
Analyst Arun Taneja of the Taneja Group said one of the reasons for the incident could be that Brocade's relationship with Packeteer wasn't as strong as it had been with Tacit, a company acquired by Packeteer and the source of the original Brocade deal. "Once Packeteer acquired Tacit, there was less synergy," he said, pointing out that Tacit and Brocade were storage-focused companies, while Packeteer is network-focused.
Taneja also said there were issues with the product that Brocade decided wasn't worth spending time and money on to fix. Competitors have criticized the local file caching Packeteer relied on for CIFS acceleration as a risky approach that could lead to cache coherency issues across large numbers of sites.
Although Brocade has remained foremost a Fibre Channel switch vendor, dumping WAFS represents a change in tune from a year ago. When Brocade launched Branch File Manager, it still considered WAFS important to its budding file area network (FAN) framework.
Brocade executives admitted their FAN sales were disappointing last quarter, accounting for less than 5% of total revenue. Still, last February they pledged to move ahead and add more FAN products.
Taneja, whose firm coined the term FAN, said the concept remains intact. "The WAFS piece of the puzzle is still alive and kicking in the industry," he said, pointing to Riverbed Technologies Inc., which boasts over 1,000 customers for WAN optimization and WAFS features. "The other elements of the framework are still very active within Brocade, such as StorageX and the [File Management Engine]."
Riverbed, meanwhile, has won a deal that will see its Steelhead appliances installed in 119 Austrade offices.