Market loyalty to Brocade

Whilst I agree that any purchase by one of the 'biggies' would jeopardise OEM business with others, I'm not sure how much impact this would have. I sell storage for one of the 'biggies' and customers almost always want the Brocade re-badged option. The amount of lost fabric sales through the competition could easily be outweighed by the access to new competitive storage environments who want to continue running Brocade fabrics. A change of fabric can typically be a bigger upheaval than a change of disk system.

The other option is that Brocade could be kept largely separate - similar to the way EMC has kept VMWare independent.