Douglas Nordgren notes re Ancor, Vixel, etc at a recent Server I/o Conference:
For FC companies aiming to serve these future servers' future pipes, it's switch to Fabric or
die.
Some Roaming Impressions:
ANCR displayed the beautifully trim MarkII and MarkII-8. They weren't plugged into
anything.
This is in marked contrast to Vixel's operating setup, though Vixel did fork over extra for a
private demo room. Walked into the Vixel room and saw their 8 port hub, their 16 port
Rapport 4000 and their new 8001 8 port switch (bigger than a tank, must be crammed with
STUFF, $8,100 retail) all looped up with some tape drives and a management console. I
asked Tom Clark, Director of Technical Marketing, "So how about we bring down your loop
and let's watch the LIPs go crazy," which he then promptly did. Their management software
has the look and feel of HP's OpenView and is fully compatible with it, but its drill-down
capability and graphics are much superior. So he popped a GBIC and I watched the loop
crash, locate the port, and reinitialize the loop in about one second. We did it again 'cause I
missed the first run-through. Then I had him remove a tape drive unit and watched the loop
rediscover and self-heal. Pretty impressive stuff, this software, and could be a seller. They
are porting it to CPQ's InSight Manager and Java.
Meanwhile, back at the Ancor booth, Tom Raeuchle, VP of engineering, told me to put my
screwdriver away, no way was he going to let me take a look inside the MKII-8. Tom is a
smart guy, before Ancor he was Director of Application Products at Cray by way of
research scientist at Honeywell and a doctorate from Cornell's CS program. When I asked
him about zoning, he proceeded to go over the talk that he was scheduled to give on hard
zoning. That was fortunate, as that was the session that I got busted (gracefully) prior to.
Will expound further later. We also talked about Public and Private Loops and The F_L port.
When we talked about future developments in Fibre Channel, he mentioned that FC speed of
2 Gigs/sec will be seen very soon and the future for FCSW looked very positive - "Let's just
say that I'm not selling any of my stock options." And then he reminded me to not put
servers on a loop. Just wish the Ancor products were in action. The Ancor booth was well
frequented though.
CMNT had ugly baseball hats and glossy literature. There were plenty of hats left when they
packed up.
EMLX was tucked away in a corner and I didn't see any hardware.
QLGC was displaying their adapters and had uni-chassied Dual Dells "Clustered" through a
Gadzoox Hub, providing server mirroring and failover capabilities. I thought of the
admonishment to not put servers on a loop and shuddered.
EMC wasn't exhibiting but the company was out in force. When I asked Ancor's Tom
Raeuchle about the FibreAlliance and EMC, he said "The FibreAlliance is about MIBs," twice.
I opined that EMC simply declared its intent to jump start the market with its MIBs and the
alliance partners simply said "sure, why not, we'll write to your MIBs if it will get us to
market" and Tom said "That's it exactly, that's exactly right." Ain't I smart? It seemed to me
that most of the EMC crew were marketing, and the two McData guys were the engineers.
EMC circulated a lot.
LSI didn't have any fibre channel cards displayed yet, just scsi, but I spoke with (I lost his
card) about their plans for FC. They are spinning their own FC ASIC following on the heels
of their Symbios acquisition. I asked him about possible conflict of interest concerns since
they fab their competitor's ASICs and also competing rivals' ASICs. His response was that
divisions were in place under NDA to protect the technologies, otherwise they couldn't do
business. We also talked about Public and Private Loops. More later.
Between stuffing my face with free food and pumping the reps for information at the open
exhibit, managed to visit almost all of the exhibitors and some more observations will follow.
That's all for now.
Douglas |
