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Technology Stocks : Son of SAN - Storage Networking Technologies

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To: J Fieb who wrote (1140)	4/1/1999 10:57:00 PM
From: GJS	Read Replies (3) of 4808

These are my personal opinions. FIO looking to extend the usefulness of a a PCI bus environment. The compatibility is important for the thousands of small systems with limited I/O requirements. PCI buses are already holding Data center class systems back. FC now provides almost 100MB/sec of I/O per path. With multiple paths into a 4x Intel quad the FC I/O can provide over 360MB/sec. The PCI based I/O architecture can only handle about 160MB/sec sustained. So there is already a need for improved I/O to the processors. The performance mentioned is at Gigabit FC rates. Today, deliverable, switched Fabric SAN's with eight switches can provide over 5,000 MB/sec of I/O to a system. In a short time we will see 2 Gigabit FC and the performance of the Fibre Channel Fabrics will double and more switches will be supportable. This could push available I/O per fabric over 20,000 MB/sec (20GB per second). Today a PCI bus can do around 120MB/sec. So you can see that it will be a non trivial engineering task to support these I/O rates with PCI buses. The Number one requirement is how to get this I/O into the faster and faster processors. If NGIO accomplishes this then it will have served its purpose well for Intel based data-centers. The concept of moving from a bus to a fabric based I/O for Intel processors is an enabeler for their use in larger and larger data-center uses. The ability to do clustered systems in a 10KM geographically dispersed SAN is an absolute advantage for Fibre Channel. Another advantage is that this capability available for use today. Any other technology is still on the drawing boards. By the time NGIO or any other solution is production ready in volume, FC will have a huge installed infrastructure that will be hard for another medium to displace. I can't comment on the SAN and clustering capabilities for NGIO.

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