Joe,
My understanding is that the basic ESCON/FICON Director Switch patents are owned by IBM and licensed to Hitachi, which is Inrange's major ESCON Director customer, and Mcdata/EMC. Mcdata, of course, has been the OEM for IBM's ESCON Director since 1994 so it naturally follows that it is also the OEM for IBM's FICON technology -- FICON sales to IBM went from $1 million in 1H99 to $13.4 million in 1H00.
FC Directors are based on ESCON/FICON Directors and IBM is reselling Mcdata FC-based Directors. Inrange is making a strong bid for second source status, which many expects to be necessary in order for the market to grow. Both IBM and EMC have Mcdata and Inrange directors working in their billion-dollar interoperability labs so there should be no problem mixing and matching the two directors in any large scale switched fabric configuration, with Mcdata perhaps enjoying the benefits of a larger installed base because it was the dominant ESCON director supplier (80+% of ESCON Director market) and it looks like it will be the dominant FICON bridge supplier - FICON bridge cards and ASICs go inside ESCON Directors. Mcdata also started selling its FC-based directors in mid-1998 while Inrange only started selling its FC directors in April 2000.
Mcdata claims that it currently has an installed base of about 400+ customers for its FC-based directors. Inrange claims that it has 2000+ customers for its telecom, data networking and storage networking (50% of revenues) products. IBM has an ESCON installed base of 6,000+ sites, which interestingly enough corresponds roughly to the 6,000+ installed base for EMC's SRDF (long distance mirroring, disaster recovery, data migration, etc). I think that gives you an idea of the size of the early adopters of FC-based SANs which are actually just upgrading from the original SAN environment: ESCON.
Those large sites are expected to expand their switched fabrics on a regular basis to keep up with storage requirements that are doubling annually and to adjust to dual trends on the server side like faster, bigger and better servers on the back-end and smaller, faster and cheaper servers on the front-end. One interesting fact worth tracking -- as a driver for FC SAN growth --- is the increased use of supercomputers by businesses driven by the need for concurrent tasking. In the annual list of the top 500 supercomputers in the world, IBM continues to dominate the top half while Sun dominates the bottom half. Cray designs, by the way, continue to dominate the top 50.
Gus
P.S. Not many people may have noticed that while waiting for its own IPO, Inrange has quietly acquired 2 small European systems integrators and 2 mainframe connectivity suppliers including the company that bought Mcdata's legacy SNA/LAN gateway products in 1994 after Mcdata snagged the exclusive OEM contract from IBM for its ESCON Directors. This could get interesting. |
