QLogic has purchased Broadcom’s 10 Gb, 40Gb and 100Gb Ethernet adapter lines.  This, added to its earlier acquisition of Brocade’s adaptor business, moves it into the #2 slot in the market, behind Intel, while freeing Broadcom to focus on its switches and other solutions that gain little leverage from the adapters, writes Wikibon Principal Research Contributor Stuart Miniman. The sale, he writes, should be seen in the context of IBM’s sale of its x86 product lines to Lenovo,allowing it to focus on its cloud services, and of the increasing impact of a few large cloud vendors on the high speed Ethernet market.

In the last year QLogic sold its InfiniBand switch business to Intel and ended development of its FC and Ethernet switchlines, so that today it no longer competes with Broadcom or Brocade. The acquisition allows QLogic to deliver 40 Gb and 100Gb Ethernet RDMA, important for Microsoft SMB products and new flash solutions such as Dell FluidCache for SAN. It makes QLogic the Intel alternative for players concerned about Intel dominance in the data center.

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Photo courtesy QLogic