San Jose, Calif. ― Broadcom Corp. takes its biggest step yet into traditional storage-networking today with the release of two 16-port, 4-Gbit/second Fibre Channel switches. The company hopes to leverage Fibre Channel transitions to both higher-data-rate and lower-cost markets to dislodge homegrown ASICs in switching systems and loop switch chips in disk arrays and servers. The release comes just two weeks after Broadcom launched new Ethernet contrailers supporting iSCSI and TCP offload for storage networking (see May 10, page 28) and three months after the fabless chip designer rolled out its first Fibre Channel parts. Other chip makers, including PMCSierra Inc. and Vitesse Semiconductor Corp., are also ramping up their storage-networking businesses.
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