Events in the Packet World

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Storage networking company Brocade Communications Systems Inc. last week agreed to acquire Foundry Networks Inc., a maker of enterprise LAN technology, for about $3 billion in cash and stock.

Foundry has 20 years history, a specialist in enterprise Ethernet LANs, have 1100 employees. The company didn’t disclose the number of staffs to lay off.

The acquisition purposed to merge the 2 companies power to fight with Cisco. Cisco has been the only company with both the vision and technology to create a FCoE unified fabric. Brocade, on the other hand, has had the FCoE vision but not the Ethernet goods. So after the acquisition completes, there will be 2 vendors in the market have the FCoE and Ethernet solution.

March 24, 2008 — Napatech today announced the investment of $5 million from Ferd Venture, Northzone Ventures and DTU Innovation. Napatech is the leader in programmable high speed Ethernet network adapters. The investment coincides with Napatech’s acquisition of the network adapter business of storage solution leader Xyratex.