Sam: I remember the Box Hill connection. It was mentioned in Box Hill's 4th Qtr report: "Our fourth quarter included many noteworthy accomplishments, including the introduction with Adaptec of a comprehensive Fibre Channel RAID storage system . . . ."
Also, in December Adaptec announced that: "its Fibre Channel-to-PCI host adaptor, the AHA-F940, will be incorporated into Avid Technology's high-performance workgroup storage solution, MediaShare F/C(TM)." Expected use was in the Macintosh for digital video applications. In the accompanying hype, an Avid director noted: "We looked to Adaptec as a leader in system bandwidth solutions to bring these qualities to our Fibre Channel solution, and Adaptec's fibre Channel host adapter offers industry-leading performance and widespread compatibility."
Might be useful to review some perspectives from Adaptec. In December, Adaptec CEO Grant Saviers was interviewed in Boston by Kelly Spang of Computer ResellerNews. He said:
-- "SCSI will continue as the interconnect for workstation and servers;"
-- moving into the next century, VARs will see Ultra 3 SCSI, doubling the performance of Ultra 2 SCSI to 160 Mbytes per second;
-- Adaptec's road map also supports Fibre Channel as another way for VARs to connect disk arrays with subsystems. "Fibre Channel will be the interconnect between boxes while SCSI will be the primary drive [interconnect] technology;"
-- With its Fibre Channel technology, Adaptec has demonstrated its ability to support the Wolfpack clustering initiative from Microsoft. Clustering via a variety of interconnects including Fibre Channel and SCSI will continue to be a focus of the company;
-- Adaptec also will offer a family of RAID solutions based on Fibre Channel to target some midrange and high-end servers;
-- by the year 2001, clustering RAID and interconnection solutions will be a $1 billion market, and Adaptec is poised to capture a share of that market with is varied product portfolio, Saviers said;
-- Under "Adaptec's Law," I/O and communications become just as important as the processor running the system, Saviers said. As such, Adaptec will continue to focus its energy on high-performance markets, including SCSI, Fibre Channel and networking solutions.
And not to let this rest too soon, in November Adaptec announced three new Fibre Channel RAID controllers and the availability in expanded distribution channels of two Fibre Channel host adaptors: the AHA-F940 and the AHA-F950.
And then there is DVB.
Starowl
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