Consolidation of storage industry accelerates with acquisitions The consolidation of the storage industry accelerated this week with McData’s acquisitions of Nishan Systems and Sanera Systems.Spending $185 million in cash on the two companies, the Broomfield, Colo. -based storage switch manufacturer believes that with these acquisitions they have “changed the future of storage networking.”Mike Gustafson, senior vice president of worldwide marketing for McData, said the company now has a complete end-to-end set of switching products for its customers. “When completely integrated we’ll have the best set of solution out there,” said Gustafson. “These acquisitions will help us get to real-time storage services.” Gustafson compared the concept of “real-time storage” to what IBM is working toward with its On Demand initiative. In other words, McData sees storage becoming more automated, adaptive, and available. To get there, McData thinks it must offer products that are scalable, intelligent, and internetworked.He explained that the acquisition of Sanera’s director-class switches fulfills the scalability issue, and the acquisition of Nishan’s family of IP-based storage switches covers off the inter-networked requirement. In order to meet the intelligent requirement, McData also invested $6 million in storage processor startup Aarohi Communications. The investment gives McData a 15 percent equity stake in the startup that builds the chip that resides in McData’s forthcoming intelligent switch platform.McData’s primary competitor in the storage switch arena, Brocade Communications Systems, was not overly concerned by the moves. “We don’t think these acquisitions ‘change the future of storage,'” said Tom Buiocchi, vice president of marketing for Brocade. “They bought three disparate technologies to do what stuff that’s been there a long time. We got all of that stuff in the acquisition of Rhapsody.”Buiocchi, added that the technology acquired from Rhapsody Networks in January already has multiprotocol support and has “all of their bases covered.” He added they’ve been working a long time to integrate that technology into its family of switches. And in the end, he believes all will have the same core of technologies.Without much difference in offerings, Buiocchi, sees each company focusing on helping their customer base move to a next generation SAN without ripping and replacing equipment. McData agrees and will too be integrating its acquisitions into its product offerings. Gustafson said each will be integrated in different timeframes, but he ventured that by the middle of next year everything will be completely integrated.He added a big part of integration is making sure its software products, SANavigator and Enterprise Fabric Connectivity Manager, can actually configure and monitor the newly acquired switches.He concluded that the Nishan products are ready to be sold today and that the Sanera technology, combined with McData technology will result in a new director-class product that will be multiservice and boast a very high port count.