IBM taps, Cisco, Juniper and Brocade to boost networking offerings

Stuart Corner
Wednesday, 22 July 2009 11:50

IT Industry - Strategy

IBM has announced new OEM agreements with Brocade, Cisco and Juniper to boost its networking and data centre products portfolio.

IBM says the new agreements will help businesses more effectively route the enormous amount of data and transactions being driven by an increasingly instrumented, interconnected, and intelligent world.

By rebranding Brocade storage products IBM has introduced the IBM Converged Switch B32 and 10Gb Converged Network Adapter (CNA) for IBM System x, its first fibre channel over ethernet (FCoE) offerings, manufactured by Brocade. Both products are immediately available. IBM said the agreement "expands upon the long-standing fibre channel and recently announced ethernet solution OEM agreement between both companies."

IBM has expanded its long-standing relationship with Cisco through a new agreement that enables its Systems & Technology Group to resell the Cisco Nexus 5000 Series family of low-latency switches for data centre networks supporting lossless 10GbE, fibre channel and fibre channel over ethernet (FCoE). These products are expected to be available in September 2009.

IBM has announced an OEM agreement with Juniper under which it rebrand and sell certain Juniper EX and MX switches and routers.

 Separately, IBM has a key role in Juniper's Stratus Project for future data centres , seen as Juniper's strategy to counter moves by arch rival Cisco in the future data centre market.