A few thoughts on the Q...Here is what they said last Q....
Demand for Fibre Channel switch solutions and our SCSI business grew during the quarter. Revenues for our switch products grew 45% sequentially, off-setting the general economic weakness in the other portions of the Fibre Channel sector.
“While the current economic environment remains challenging for us in the near term, we believe that the overall long term demand for our products continues to be encouraging,” noted H.K. Desai, the company’s Chairman, CEO and President. “The key to our achievement in this challenging environment is our diversity and our ability to maintain our competitive balance as new technologies emerge, and when stronger growth trends return.”
Q has no channel yet to speak of so no inventory could get built up there.
The SUNW ramp has been very slow, but could be picking up steam, . So SUNW has little to no inventory to build up either. Most of us expect SUNW to unveil Purple two, and maybe partner with HDS, and finally support full FC fabric by maybe Aug. The Sbus market, and the FC fabric installs done by SUNW professional services should start to flow toward Q from the others.
Q's generally ready with next generation products on time and if others aren't ready they are there to take market share. Perhaps this will make for a nice summer for them. Perhaps it caused a few extra switch sales for those HDTV post production installs by Leitch or others.
Q's biz has (perhaps) slowed as the expected numbers for this Q are less than last Q. But they didn't trim by nearly s much as many others and only one time.
This news piece today is significant in that the ability of the short game to shake the price is nullified. Unless they start FUD on the Sept Quarter. Those guys can't scare me now. Last quarter Q suggested that in the fall they may have some sequential growth again. Let's see if they stick to that in the cc.
If only a few companies can deliver the growth that so many search for, those price targets of SSB and others will be here by fall.
It is good for the sector to have some of the fear removed. Let's see how the others fare. I have decided that the slowdown in IT spending may help Q a little, if anyone bought big fabric up till now it was likely BRCD. Now they may say trial some 2G for now and then decide to move to next generation, where Q is much more likely to make some sales.
Internet.com (June 26, 2001)
NEW YORK -- The two popular misnomers with the storage segment of IT is that network-attached storage (NAS) is a networking technology based on Ethernet while storage area networks (SAN) rely on fibre channels. Storage networking can even run over "scuzzy" -- small computer system interface (SCSI) -- albeit cannot be deployed as easily or cost-effectively, according to a leading expert.
"SAN really is just a network of SCSI devices. Just like IP, it can go over different data transports," said Jacob Farmer, senior consultant at Boston-based Cambridge Computer Services Inc. Farmer was the lead-off speaker of SAN Summit, which on Monday marked the start of the TechXNY 2001 trade show at the Javits Center in Manhattan.
SAN Summit kicked off with two well-attended conferences on storage technology. The crowds directly reflected the amount of interest in the IT segment, given all the research that projects storage as the single largest IT investment that many companies will make this year.
To differentiate between NAS and SAN, Farmer explained during his "Introduction to SANs" seminar, NAS is a system that simply transfers files between two or more host computers, which he referred to as "initiators." A SAN, meanwhile, transfer information in blocks rather than files and need to rely on a file system to organize the blocks into files.
But what many IT managers, directors and chief information officerss fail to understand is that storage networking isn't as simple as plugging two or more CPUs to a hard-drive or DAT. For example, if two Windows NT machines are plugged into a one tera-byte hard-drive, the OS on both machines will each send its own respective signature files and repeatedly try to re-format.
In order to effectively deploy a SAN, you need to partition your SCSI device and create redundant connections to back-up that I/O processing, Farmer said. For that reason, SCSI-based networks fall short when compared with fibre.
"It doesn't matter what you connect...what matters is what you run over that connection," Farmer said.
A hard drive or DAT can be partitioned so that certain portions of the drive can be assigned to a specific CPU. However, the best way to partition is to assign a portion to a device based on its Logical Unit Number (LUN), which is just a subset of the SCSI device.
"If a SCSI ID is a street address, then the LUN is like an apartment number," Farmer explained.
Unfortunately, the switch at the center of a SAN directing the I/O processing doesn't recognize LUN, meaning the partitioning needs to be created at the host level or on the device.
Anyone who missed Monday's seminar can register for a free, three-hour course explaining the basics of SAN technology here on the Cambridge Web site. Bob Liu
internet.com corp. |
