To All,
Several interesting quotes from an article titled, "Fibre Channel - VARs turn to Fibre Channel for bandwidth on the back end", which begins on page 171 of the November 15th issue of VARBusiness magazine.
"The technology's lure is so strong, in fact, that EMF Associates, a Half Moon Bay, Calif., market research firm, predicts that sales of Fibre Channel-related products will jump from $2 billion this year to $10 billion by 2000 and to $20 billion by the 2002-to-2003 time frame."
"The technology's raw speed is only one aspect of its appeal. Its ability to support both networking and data storage protocols simultaneously means it allows merging the two into a single topology and puts some luster into the disaster-recovery arena."
"It was this capability that "first attracted us--because of the possibility of integrating high-performance storage access with network access," says Chris Hanson, manager of hardware, commercialization and operations at network integrator GeoQuest, a Houston division of Schlumberger. GeoQuest develops software and workgroups for use in oil and gas exploration environments, and "our applications and data generally expand to fill out available resources," he says."
"What we started finding out in early 1996," Hanson explains, "is that two of the latest crop of workstations, such as Sun Microsystems Inc.'s UltraSPARCs, could saturate a 100-Mbps Fast Ethernet link. We had investigated Fast Ethernet and FDDI and understood the limits of 100 Mbps. We considered going to OC-3 (155-Mbps) ATM, but that's not a big enough jump."
"Consequently, GeoQuest has started integrating Ancor Communications Inc.'s GigWorks Fibre Channel switches and FCS adapters into its turnkey solutions. "A gigabit (transfer rate) was the natural place to go to," says Hanson."
There is also an interesting discussion with a gentleman from AVDigital, who said that they had been working with Ancor, but that they (Ancor) didn't have a good understanding of the film and video industry. They are now working with Prisa Networks.
Sorry, but I could not find a direct link to this article on the VARBusiness web site.
If the EMF estimates are true, Fibre Channel shows a pretty steep ramp over the next two or three years.
The GeoQuest information just adds a little bit to what we knew from the press release. It would certainly appear that this is 1 Gig gear, and that GeoQuest has packaged it into some sort of turnkey solution. I also found the timing of this article interesting. Perhaps Ancor issued a press release because they knew that this article was imminent? (Pure speculation on my part.)
Craig
P.S. There is also a nice picture of a Brocade SilkWorm switch. Way to go, Brenda. <g> (I didn't see a quote from Brenda, though.) |
