Broadcom Acquires Cloud Specialist Dune Networks
Dune, a privately held company based in Sunnyvale, Calif., brings to Broadcom a portfolio of switch fabric products that help scale data centers for cloud computing environments. Among those products is a chipset capable of supporting 100 Gbps-per-port bandwidth speeds and connecting more than 10,000 servers in a single deployment.
"Dune's massively scalable interconnectfabric, combined with our Ethernet products, augments our portfolio of solutions for data center networking equipment," said Martin Lund, vice president and general manager of Broadcom's Network Switching division, in a statement. "This technology is particularly well suited to meet the emerging requirements for cloud computing networks at a large scale, and will enable us to address new market applications for Ethernet in the data center."
Irvine, Calif.-based Broadcom develops semiconductors for wired and wireless networking infrastructure. According to Broadcom, it will pay about $178 million in cash to acquire all of Dune Networks' outstanding shares and assets. Broadcom expects the acquisition to close by the end of Broadcom's first fiscal quarter, ending March 31, 2010.
Broadcom earlier this year made an unsuccessful bid to acquire storage networking vendor Emulex. That deal, which Broadcom dropped in July, would have bolstered Broadcom's portfolio of converged data center networking solutions.
The convergence market has seen plenty of consolidation this year. Iin May, Emulex competitor QLogic nabbed 10-Gbit IP networking specialist NetXen.