> I always wondered what held them back from building a meaningful networking business in the US.

It was just timing. Their networking gear was built on some very impressive ASICs which became commodity chips a few years later before they could grow. Arista, Juniper, et al ate their lunch using other vendors’ IP. IIRC it was Broadcom and Fulcrum that released the chips that killed them.

>We were building 40 Gbps packet sniffers at Google (4x 10 Gbps NICs) and needed switches that could do things like mirror traffic across ports at line rate

I'm sure there were good reaasons for this, but man this just sounds bad. Like that's the spec I think NSA must give to their contractors outfitting 611 Folsom Street's Room 641A

The XG series switches? Force10 sold them until Dell bought Force10 and continued to sell them (although the firmware changed a lot along the way). They were, AFAIK, pretty popular in the US under the Dell brand.

My home network is XG2000 10G core and a few XG0224 1G/10G dist. Very nice switches.

AFAIK those sold relatively well, considering the TCO of both sides (NICs were very expensive and there were like a dozen companies vying for position once upon a time). They were also interesting because they were cut-through. CX4 was noticeably lower latency than SFP+. So a very fast, but feature limited architecture which is probably why other players like Cisco and then Arista (aka Broadcom) took over.

The likely just didn't want another round of tantrums and troubles: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1986_U.S.%E2%80%93Japan_Semico...

Having a us based vendor. Fujitsu is huge in Asia for ISPs and so is Mitsubishi and Sumitomo (yes they made or used to make network equipment too)

Their servers were gorgeous (on the inside) as well. Clean designs, no clutter.

Seems like a story mirrored across Japanese companies.

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