Brocade Lands DTCC deal

Brocade Communications Systems Inc. (Nasdaq: BRCD) has announced a "multimillion-dollar" SAN contract with the Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTCC).

The news is well timed, to say the least, coming as it does just prior to Brocade's second-quarter earnings report, due after market close Wednesday. Indeed, Brocade was unavailable for comment due to the required quiet period before its report.

The specific worth of the contract was not disclosed.

Based in New York, the DTCC is the holding company for the world's largest depository of securities. Its client list includes a large number of brokerage houses, securities firms, banks, trust companies, insurance providers, investment managers, and mutual fund companies. Clients include The National Association of Securities Dealers and the New York Stock Exchange.

In total, DTCC holds more than $23 trillion worth of equity, corporate debt, and municipal bond transactions; it serves more than 40,000 end users; and last year it processed more than 2.6 billion transactions valued at more than $100 trillion.By any measure, that's a colossus of important financial data -- and it's now running on a storage area network (SAN).

The DTCC decided on a SAN to make better use of its technical personnel and storage resources, spokespeople say. Like other companies, it found that a huge percentage of its storage costs went to managing the data from isolated, direct-attached storage devices. As data grew, so did the costs of maintaining it.

We couldn’t keep pace with the growth of our data,” says a DTCC official. In four months, the company’s data storage requirements increased 400 percent. “The only way to get a handle on this growth was to move storage onto a scaleable network,” he says.

With the new SAN infrastructure, DTCC says it manages four times as much data with the same number of data administrators.

The DTCC has connected its SAN across a metro optical network to enable backup across remote sites. “This eliminates the need for expensive, offsite data storage, such as a giant EMC Corp. system, and it means we can increase capacity for users and applications as needed,” the DTCC official said.The DTCC storage network is based on Brocade’s SilkWorm 2800 16-port switches. It interconnects servers and storage from multiple vendors and supports mirrored data and dynamic failover to back up data in case of application or system failure.

The announcement isn't hurting Brocade any. In late afternoon trading Monday, Brocade shares were trading at 45.33, up 2.78 (6.55%).

Analyst Shaw Wu at Banc of America Securities LLC said in a midday note to clients that, based on his industry and channel research, Brocade is on track to meet or exceed fiscal third-quarter earnings and revenue estimates.

— Jo Maitland, Senior Editor, Byte and Switch http://www.byteandswitch.com

Movers and shakers from more than 100 companies – including Brocade and EMC – will be speaking at StorageNet, Byte and Switch’s annual conference, being held in New York City, October 2-5, 2001. Check it out at StorageNet2001