Thread: The following is OTOT (but not entirely) in response to George's question regarding I/Os coming down the line. Although it may appear by some of the post that I am negative toward FC, that would be an incorrect assumption, and I am well invested in Ancor, Interphase, and MTIC, all of which, I believe, have great prospects. I did not expect my response would go in the direction it ultimately took, especially with the Adaptec comments. But I think it useful to see what one giant in the I/O industry is thinking.
George, the speed in the new I/O architectures is quite high, in the gigaByte range. I've included some links, below, addressing the future architectures.
The news on JNI's employment of Adaptec's FC technology was very interesting to me when I saw a JNI press release last month. Adaptec had to make a decision last year which way to go and it apparently decided FC--for its business plan, at least--was not that way. It appears to be putting its money on future I/O architectures while milking SCSI (still improving) for all it's worth. Its view on FC is encapsulated in the statement below:
"Fibre Channel's long-term viability is increasingly cloudy because of
competing proposals such as Intel Corp.'s NGIO proposal and the Future
I/O (FIO) proposal from IBM and Hewlett Packard."
adaptec.com
And in the following:
"All new complex technologies initially face intractable and nettlesome interoperability problems, And, they are part of the admission price for all early adopters. The SCSI industry faced their similar problems and resolved them long ago. Hence, the SCSI community is well aware of the unenviable and formidable challenges the Fibre Channel faces in this dreary area, not to mention the serious competitive threats higher performance or lesser expensive serial alternatives such as Gigabit Ethernet, Future IO™ , and Intel's NGIO™pose."
adaptec.com
Sources for NGIO and FIO:
busandboard.com
developer.intel.com
busandboard.com
How all of this will shape up I just don't have a clue, but I think it is worth following for us investors. Right now FC and SAN are great places to be, as it will be several years before the new I/O takes hold.
Starowl |
