No. That's fine with me. That leaves a lot of room for directional upgrades as McDATA posts its quarterly numbers. As you know, McDATA is unusual for an IPO and unique for a fibre channel player in that its addressable market consists of the first generation SAN (ESCON/FICON) AND the second generation SAN (1 Gbps Fibre Channel). As such, it is already working on the $2 billion revenue milestone while its leading competitor still has to break past $100 million in quarterly sales. What most investors currently see are the fibre channel sales ONLY as a result of the 1997 reorganization.
I do think they have to consider splitting the stock as soon as feasible to increase the float available for accumulation. They have an aggressive product introduction program starting this quarter so, coupled with increased sales, that should provide them with ample opportunity.
McDATA Product Road Map (source: Merril Lynch)
3Q2000 - 9-port ES-1000 (general availability: August)
4Q2000 - 16- and 32-port ES-3000
1Q2000 - 64-port Director Switch ED-6000*
* EMC currently sells the 32-port ED-5000 in one and two-director configuration depending on the backbone layout. Connectrix is growing at over 300% Y/Y so the customer uptake is quite positive. My guess is that EMC will continue to use the 64-port ES-6000 in one-director or two-director configurations at the enterprise core and offer its customers a choice of Brocade, Ancor and McDATA departmental and workgroup switches.
That product road map completes McDATA's transition away from the Brocade ASICs that it started using in 1997. This 1997 EETimes article provides context and gives you an idea of how their design philosophy may have changed since then.
"Fibre Channel switching is still a small enough niche that we are more interested in validating the market than in direct competition," said McData president Jack McDonnell.....
.....McData had been developing an architecture in which a large matrix switch controlled three Fibre Channel switches, one of which served as a standby that would fill in if one of the two primary switches failed. To speed time-to-market, the company used Brocade modules as the three direct switches, adding its own matrix-switch controller on top.
eet.com
As indicated in their S1/A filings, McDATA's ASICs will already support 1 and 2 Gbps, and will also include the most stable version of the MIB (management information base) proposed by the EMC-led FibreAlliance. The significance of this is that it throws the gauntlet at the other vendors who claim they want to achieve management interoperability between storage systems. The MIB lets any storage vendor who employs it to attach to other MIB-compliant storage products.
Q: What has the FibreAlliance accomplished to date?
A: To date, the FibreAlliance has reached several major milestones. Since its formation in February, the members of the FibreAlliance have cooperated on drafting a detailed engineering specification. The specification, now completed, describes an integrated management framework in which software products can gain a high-level view of the storage network and launch other software to provide detailed performance information. The FibreAlliance submitted the specification to the Internet Engineering Task Force (IEFT), the governing standards body, as an initial working draft toward possible creation of a standard. The spec is working its way through the IETF process.
fibrealliance.com
fibrealliance.com |
