Malavalli changes job profile at Brocade

Kumar Malavalli, the Indian-born Silicon Valley entrepreneur who co-founded Brocade Communications and was also the chief technology officer of the company, has now donned the role of being a technology advisor to the CEO of Brocade.

Malavalli along Paul Bonderson, who was with Sun Microsystems, co-founded Brocade in 1995 and built it into one of the global players in the storage area network (SAN) market, which has current revenues of $525 million.

A spokesperson for Brocade said: "Kumar Malavalli opted out on his own in not being a active participant in the day-to-day operations of Brocade as he is involved in developing the industry of Fibre Channel. He continues to be a technology advisor to our CEO."

During 2003, he was included in the Silcon Valley Engineering Hall of Fame for his path-breaking work in storage area networking.

The importance of storage becomes obvious given the exponentially increasing volume of critical information in the business sector.

Typically, this information is stored in disk arrays and tape subsystems, connected to large, powerful servers. With the advent of SAN, storage devices are disconnected from the server and connected directly on the network.

This provides centralised and scaleable storage shared by many servers and clients. What Brocade is trying to evangelise is to transfer storage functions from the servers and put it in the networks. Servers should primarily be used for what they are meant "" serving applications "" not managing data, is the whole ideology of Brocade.

The company on Friday also announced the launch of a clutch of products designed to address the needs of enterprise storage networks ranging from entry-level SANs to large-scale data centres.

Brocade is also at an advanced stage of setting up its subsidiary in India and is also looking at the possibility to set up an captive software development centre in the country. It already has a effective partnership with Wipro for software development.