On Monday, April 4 Brocade Communications Systems announced its intention to acquire the company for $ 1.5 billion Ruckus Wireless. It seems that another strong player on the network solutions market is emerging before our eyes, able to compete with such powers as HPE and Cisco.

It is clear that the takeover of Aruba by HP, about what we wrote in March 2015, resulted in a change of the market leader in network technologies. This is indicated by the Gartner report published in September 2015, which we commented recently on our blog. In addition to the leading position, HPE draws attention strong weakening of Cisco's position and the grouping of many companies in the middle of the chart for the completeness of the solution vision. Brocade and Ruckus are also in the main group.

At this point, however, it should be noted that for some time Gartner has been treating the offer of solutions in the field of wired and wireless networks as a whole. This approach enables an objective evaluation of the comprehensive network offer and at the same time weakens the position of manufacturers with only LAN solutions or only WLAN solutions. In this context, the Brocade-Ruckus offer should be strongly shifted to the right in the near future. This is all the more likely as both companies have the flexibility and adaptability that are not appropriate for very large corporations such as HPE or Cisco.

About Brocade Communications
Brocade was founded in 1995 by Seth Neiman - former manager at Sun Microsystems and professional racing driver (!), Kumar Malavia - co-author of the Fiber Channel protocol specification, and Paul R. Bonderson, manager from Intel and Sun Microsystems.

Currently, Brocade Communications Systems in IT environments is associated primarily with high-quality, efficient solutions for SAN networks. As a leader in the implementation of the Fiber Channel protocol, the company sells its products both through its own network of partners, as well as under OEM agreements with major suppliers of IT solutions such as HPE, Dell, EMC, NetApp, Fujitsu, Hitachi, Huawei, IBM, Lenovo or Oracle .
Beginning in 2008, after purchasing Foundry Networks, Brocade also offers a wide range of LAN and WAN devices. Such products include ultra-fast switches for data centers, enterprise-class switches and routers, load balancers. It should be mentioned that Brocade actively supports network virtualization solutions as well SDN (Software Defined Networking) by offering own products and participating in Open Networking Foundation and contribution to the work on the protocol OpenFlow.

We also invite you to read the article on our website dedicated to the product family Brocade FCS Fabric dedicated to data centers.

About Ruckus Wireless

Ruckus is an innovative company founded in 2004 by William Kish and Victor Shtrom. Since its inception, it has focused on providing indoor and outdoor wireless products from the "Smart WiFi" family for Internet providers and enterprises.

As the owner of many patents in the field of wireless voice, image and data transmission, Ruckus has made a significant contribution to the development of WLAN technology. Thanks to the use of adaptive matrix antennas, it was possible to increase the range and speed of data transmission, reduce interference effects and thus enable the transmission of delay-sensitive data and multimedia services using the standard 802.11 protocol.
It was Ruckus who invented and designed the technology of matrix antennas BeamFlexand then sold licenses to other producers to use beam forming technology. Beam forming technologies are now available on access points from many vendors such as Aruba, Cisco, Meru, and others.

In 2015, Ruckus was the first manufacturer to implement the 802.11ac Wave 2 standard in its access point long before others - it was the Ruckus ZoneFlex R710. According to data from Ruckus Wireless, this device provides transmission speed of 800Mbps at 2.4GHz and 1733Mbps at 5GHz.

Oh, it will be happening !!!

In my earlier post, I discussed QSAN matrices. Each of them has its own built-in management panel, but the question arises whether it is possible to manage several matrices from one place. The answer is - YES. All you need is QCentral software. I will not elaborate on the possibilities of this software now, I would like to share only the experience I gained while running this application.

This software is written in java. The file has a .jar extension. Hence, problems with starting Qcentral may arise. If the program cannot be started, check if the Java virtual machine - JRE (Java runtime enviroment) is installed in the system. If we still can't run Qcentral please add environment variables. Below is an example for Java 7 on a 64-bit system. Find the location of the java.exe file on your own system.

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In connection with granting Upgreat the status Authorized QSAN Sub-distributor in Poland, we decided to share our impressions about the products offered by this manufacturer.

But let me start with maybe general information about mass storage.

They are present in almost every large enterprise, institution or used for private purposes. Most of the Internet resources are stored on mass memory. Hence, it is important that these devices are reliable and efficient. Our experience with such devices is based mainly on such vendors as HP, IBM, NetApp. Due to the award of the status of the Authorized QSAN Sub-distributor, we received two matrix models from this manufacturer. It is a Taiwanese manufacturer that started operating in 2004. Qsan Technology (this is the full name of the company) specializes in the production of a complete line of SAN, iSCSI, Fiber Channel SAN storage network products for global enterprises, medium and small businesses.

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In the course of discussions with the client about the configuration and size of the storage, I went down to a fairly low level of detail. To my surprise, it turned out that 15,000 rpm disks do not have to be faster than 10K disks !!!

It is assumed that the performance of various types of disk drives should be estimated as follows:

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On December 10-11, at the Remes hotel in Opalenica, a meeting of HP MASE engineers devoted to new products for 2015 was held. UpGreat engineers also participated in the training. Among the premieres of the 3PAR and MSA matrices in the coming months, attention should be paid to e.g. introducing such functionalities as:

• File Persona Software in 3PAR arrays, allowing for the implementation of, inter alia, NFS and SMB file sharing protocols
• Virtual pools in MSA arrays, allowing the "stretching" of volumes on different raid groups
• Second level Read Cache based on SSD disks in MSA arrays
• New, prettier and more intuitive web GUI in MSA arrays
• Automatic tiering in MSA matrices

In HP MSA P2000 arrays, there is an occasional problem with accessing the controller interface from a web browser. Fortunately, the solution to this problem is quite simple and requires no interruption in access to the matrix. Log in with the ssh client or console cable to one of the array controllers and restart it with the command below:

restart mc [a | b | both]

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