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This year's Storage Networking World Europe show focused attention on Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE). However, while SAN vendors promoted FCoE as a way to extend Fibre Channel's reach and longevity, skeptics described it as unnecessary -- and perhaps even a Cisco-powered Trojan horse intended to wipe out rival networking supplier Brocade Communications.

Foundry Networks says a shareholder vote on its amended deal to be acquired by Brocade could be further delayed.

Foundry Networks stock closed down over 25 percent Friday after the company said it is postponing a shareholder vote on its merger with Brocade.

EMC and NetApp pushed new Fibre Channel over Ethernet products at Storage Networking World in the US last week, but the technology may not gain mainstream adoption for more than a year.

EMC said Monday it will support a line of Emulex network adapters that use Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCOE), giving a big-name boost to an emerging technology that could become the common transport across an entire data center.

Buying faster switches might not be the only way to amp up performance across data center networks, according to researchers at the University of California, San Diego, who this week proposed a network architecture that would enable commodity Ethernet switches to deliver better performance at a lower cost than their 10 Gigabit Ethernet counterparts.

Network Instruments has developed what it claims is the largest network data recorder available. The GigaStor SAS has a capacity of up to 288 terabytes, and was originally developed for a U.S. military customer which needed to store a month's worth of the traffic on its network, said Douglas Smith, the company's president and co-founder.

EMC Tuesday will ship a new generation of its Clariion midrange storage-area network disk array, which makes support for iSCSI a standard feature, offers new energy-saving software tools and gives customers the option to use flash memory.

Brocade's pending acquisition of Foundry Networks and its IP network technology will give Brocade a shot in the arm in the area of Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE), a technology expected to make major data center inroads in the next few years.

Brocade Communications Systems' planned US$3 billion acquisition of Foundry Networks is a major strategic move in a brewing war over the future of data-center connectivity, industry analysts said Tuesday.

Brocade's proposed US$3 billion acquisition of Foundry Networks this week would create a stronger data center competitor to Cisco while raising the stakes even higher for other Ethernet switch companies.