Brocade Acquires NuView, Expands Enterprise File Data Management

The acquisition compliments the existing business of San Jose, Calif.-based Brocade, a leading developer of Fibre Channel switches and related equipment, with new opportunities for customers and partners, and comes on the heels of the release earlier Monday of new switches and directors along with the company's first entry into the iSCSI management space, said Michael Klayko, Brocade CEO.

The NuView technology is expected to be integrated into Brocade's Tapestry Wide Area File Services (WAFS) solution, which Brocade introduced last June.

With NuView, Brocade gets five new product lines to help expand the company's business outside of its traditional Fibre Channel SAN space, Klayko said.

They include StorageX, which enables administrators to transparently add, consolidate, migrate and automate the failover of heterogeneous servers and NAS appliances. Klayko said that StorageX compliments Brocade's recently introduced Tapestry Wide Area File Services (WAFS) solution to make it easier to centralize the management of remote office data across all leading NAS platforms.

Other NuView applications include File Lifecycle Manager, an ILM technology that allows policy-based movement of files according to customer requirements; MyView, which lets users personalize and secure access to storage resources across the enterprise, but only those for which the user is authorized; Data on Demand Manager, which allows quick full and partial data restorations after a disaster or for data migration; and Universal Naming Convention Update for updating linked files as primary files are moved.

Like Brocade, NuView software is sold primarily via OEMs and solution providers, said Klayko. He said the target market is any customer with a range of file servers or NAS appliances with a capacity of 1 Tbyte or more.

Tom Buiocchi, vice president of worldwide marketing and support, said that the NuView technology is focused on enterprise-wide data management, and so requires a variety of services to architect and implement. "We plan to build new services around this technology for our partners," he said.

Michael Fanelli, western regional manager for SSI hubcity, a Metuchen, N.J.-based solution provider, said he has been looking at bringing on NuView as a vendor. "I like the way they provide alternative paths for disaster recovery at a minimum expense," Fanelli said. "It's easy for administrators to use NuView to redirect their servers if they need to."

But while the acquisition seems to be a good one for Brocade, Fanelli said he is still reserving judgment on the channel merits because of his experience of working with small vendors that get acquired by larger companies.

"When you partner with a small company, and it gets acquired, you don't know how things might change," he said. "You don't know if their partner programs will change, or who will run the programs. At least Brocade is a partner-friendly company."