EU Says Broadcom's Proposed VMware Deal Could Restrict Competition (reuters.com) 10
The European Commission on Wednesday said U.S. chipmaker Broadcom's proposed $61 billion takeover of cloud computing company VMware could restrict competition in the market for certain hardware components. From a report: The Commission said it had informed Broadcom of its objection that the deal could restrict competition in the global markets for the supply of so-called fibre channel host bus adapters (FC HBAs) and storage adapters, by limiting access for competitors' hardware to VMware's software.
That's the best they could come up with? (Score:2)
Seriously?
There's really two FC HBA providers out there -- Broadcom (QLogic) and Marvell (Emulex).
The best they can come up with from this entire mess is that Marvell may have a harder time writing drivers for ESXi?
Seems like a pretty weak argument to me -- all Broadcom has to do is say "We'll keep the Device Driver Development Kit available for Marvell till 21 years after the last descendant of King George III dies" (i.e. play the Disney card) and ... that squashes that.
This is all the European Commission
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I work in a market segment that once upon a time, pretty much every engagement also had FC as part of it.
We had done our first FC engagement in about 4 years or so the other week.
Shared standards based block devices are generally pretty rare too. Occasionally iSCSI, or NVMoF, but mostly implementation specific strategy for network storage (e.g. is it a Linux based virtualization? Ceph probably. A high performance filesystem? Maybe Ceph there too, but Spectrum Storage, BeeGFS, or WekaIO are also likely. V
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Seriously?
There's really two FC HBA providers out there -- Broadcom (QLogic) and Marvell (Emulex).
The best they can come up with from this entire mess is that Marvell may have a harder time writing drivers for ESXi?
Seems like a pretty weak argument to me -- all Broadcom has to do is say "We'll keep the Device Driver Development Kit available for Marvell till 21 years after the last descendant of King George III dies" (i.e. play the Disney card) and ... that squashes that.
This is all the European Commission could come up with?
Yeah, FC certainly isn't much of a growth market. I think it's been 7-8 years since I deployed any new FC arrays. Most new gear I've been putting out is ethernet based ISCSI.
Second both nbvb and tgeek.
Fibrechannel is a shrinking market.
People in the year of our lord 2023 are either using iSCSI or FibreChannel over converged ethernet. Yeah, it has more latency than regular Fibrechannel, but has much more speed, and less price.
No one in their right mind would consider native Fibrechannel in 2023 unless they have a very good reason to do so, and those (both people and reasons) are few and far between...
These people are trying to slove yesteryear's problem.
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Even FCoE is a really really rare thing to bother with. It is still a lot of the aggravating pickiness of FC, but just trying to execute on ethernet.
It really didn't help FC that basically all the vendors dialed 'extort the customers' to 11 (and dragged much of that mindset over to FCoE.
iSCSI persists mainly for being supremely boringly easy and cheap to implement. NVMoF is *trying* to be a thing, but in my experience the appetite broadly for 'shared media standards based block storage' is not really there
That's the whole point! (Score:2)
That's the whole point! The EU is asking for measures that would preserve competition. What is wrong with Americans? You talk about free markets, but you don't understand it. Broadcom has the opportunity to reply to the Commission's objections.
"A Statement of Objections is a formal step in an investigation, where the Commission informs the companies concerned in writing of the objections raised against them. The sending of a Statement of Objections does not prejudge the outcome of the investigation. Broadco
Funny category to pick on, but... (Score:3)
The point stands that Broadcom is all over *every* market segment. Ethernet (adapters and switches) and SAS are two more biggies.
However, it's probably more fear that they will 'Avago' the company. Broadcom (a name that Avago acquired when they 'Avagoed' broadcom is an acquire, loot, and pillage sort of strategy. When something is acquired by this company, roadmaps quickly dry up. I recall reading a leaked strategy presentation about a recent acquisition at the time, and it said point blank that they think there are about 25% of their customers that are so stuck, they could jack up pricing 10 fold and they'd still pay up. Further, that they could cut development spending, as again, those customers are stuck and spending to give them more functions and features is just a waste of money. So they basically outright declared the strategy was acquire, gouge, scare away 75% of the customers (less support burden), and stop innovation to maintain high revenue with negligible investment.
Broadcom is where tech companies go to be milked to death.
Absolute bullshit (Score:2)
FC HBAs are not difficult to make. And FC switches are also pretty damn simple.
Consider this, FC is a basic encapsulation with very basic routing. The token based architecture of the flow control mechanism is trivial. Overall, the silicon aspect of FC is far simpler than many other systems. From a software aspect, nearly everything of value is part of the operating system and drivers.
Producing an FC HBA from scratch could be done easily using an PCIe FPGA development board
Really? (Score:2)
Dell owned both EMC and VMware for a while, I don't recall seeing any issues with that.... so why the worry about Broadcom? Who did they forget to pay off?