Brocade Communications Systems, Inc., was an American technology company specializing in storage networking products, now a subsidiary of Broadcom Inc.

Prior to the acquisition, the company expanded into adjacent markets including a wide range of IP/Ethernet hardware and software products.

On November 2, 2016, Singapore-based chip maker Broadcom Limited announced it was buying Brocade for about $5.5 billion.

Brocade was founded in August 1995, by Seth Neiman (a venture capitalist, a former executive from Sun Microsystems and a professional auto racer), Kumar Malavalli (a co-author of the Fibre Channel specification) and Paul R. Bonderson (a former executive from Intel Corporation and Sun).

The top three underwriters (based on number of shares) for Brocade's IPO were, in order, Morgan Stanley Dean Witter, BT Alex.Brown, and Dain Rauscher Wessels.

[3] On November 2, 2016, Singapore-based chip maker Broadcom Limited announced they were buying Brocade for $5.5 billion.

As part of the announcement, Broadcom said they would sell Brocade's networking business to avoid competing with its top customers such as Cisco Systems.

[1] On August 8, 2017, Brocade announced that its SDN technology had been spun off as a new company called Lumina Networks.

This follows the sales of other divisions designed to allow the Broadcom acquisition to proceed, including Ruckus Wireless, Connectem (vEPC), Virtual ADC, Vyatta & vRouter, and Brocade's data center networking business.

Brocade's first Fibre Channel switch SilkWorm 1000 (SW1000) (released in 1997) was based on the "Stitch" 1 Gbit/s ASIC and their own VxWorks-based firmware (Fabric OS or FOS).

[7] From 2001 to 2003, Brocade released switches based on its third generation ASIC, "BLOOM" (Big LOOM).

The Bloom ASIC also introduced a notable capability of frame-level Fibre Channel trunking, which provided high throughput with load balancing across multiple cables.

In 2004, the BLOOM II improved on the previous ASIC design by reducing its power consumption and die size, while maintaining 2 Gbit/s technology.

In 2006, the second generation multiprotocol Fibre Channel router 7500 switch and FR4-18i blade for the 48000 director were launched.

These are DCB/CEE- and TRILL-based switches, eliminating the need for Spanning Tree Protocol, and supporting multi-hop Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) and self-trunking.

It includes optical UltraScale inter-chassis links (ICLs) which simplify scale-out design for multi-chassis architectures.

[18] In April 2018, Brocade launched the Gen 6 (32 Gbit/s) G630 enterprise switch (128-port) and FC32-64 high density blade (64-port) for the X6 Director.

[20] In September 2020,[21] Brocade launched the X7 Director and G720 Switch, their first Gen 7 (64 Gbit/s) Fibre Channel products.

In February 2022, [22] Brocade launched the Gen 7 (64 Gbit/s) G730 128-port switch and the 64 Gbit/s double density optical transceiver.

The first family of SAN switches, the SilkWorm 1000, released in 1997, were based on the first generation of Brocade ASICs, called Stitch.

Brocade entered into the Federal, ISP, carrier, enterprise and campus switch/router market through its acquisition of Foundry Networks in 2008.

It is designed for data center top-of-rack (ToR) environments and Federal, enterprise and campus LAN aggregation deployments.

In 2005, Gregory Reyes resigned as CEO after being indicted for securities fraud relating to backdating stock option grants.

After spending about a year investigating these allegations, the Department of Justice (DoJ), through the US Attorney's Office, the SEC, and the FBI filed criminal and civil charges against Reyes.

In roughly the same time frame, the DoJ, SEC, and FBI also began investigating over 100 other companies for similar activities.

Greg Reyes and Stephanie Jensen, the former vice president of HR, were charged with 12 counts of fraud.

[34] Stephanie Jensen, Brocade's former vice president of human resources, was convicted in a separate trial.

[37] On August 18, 2009, the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit overturned Gregory Reyes' convictions and sent the case back to the lower courts for retrial, where he was again convicted, and sentenced to 18 months in prison and a $10 million fine.

The jury also returned an unambiguous verdict for patent and copyright infringement and trade secret misappropriation covering A10's entire AX Series load balancing server products.

Brocade announced on January 11, 2013, a San Jose federal court confirmed a $60 million damages verdict against A10 Networks and entered an order permanently enjoining A10 from infringing on Brocade's patents involving technologies for Global Server Load Balancing and High Availability.