GigaOm speculates on who will buy Brocade

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As you probably know, the Wall Street Journal has been reporting this week that data-storage and network company Brocade Communications has put itself up for sale. As the big vendors increasingly try to get customer interest by creating unified solutions (Cisco’s UCS was the first), Brocade may be seeing a future where its products won’t matter unless it gets in on a unified platform.

GigaOm’s Stacey Higginbotham speculates on who might write the check, looking at IBM, HP, Dell, and Juniper

Juniper: This is our pick for the buyer, as it already shares some of the same server partnerships that Brocade does. Additionally, Brocade has a lot of networking R&D (and products) aimed at upcoming data center channels that Juniper could take advantage of. So while Juniper isn’t really in the position to make a big acquisition right now, this would allow it to focus on new carrier and service provider standards, like LTE.