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To: Mohan Marette who wrote (75)	8/19/1999 1:15:00 AM
From: FC_Fan	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1583

Mohan, Crossroads is a strong player in the FC market. Their main product is something that people refer to as a FC bridge, (not a great description..). It is a necessary product in that if you want to connect something that does NOT have a Fibre Channel port to a Fibre Channel Network, the dominant way of accomplishing this is to use this type of FC product. The FC bridge actually connects to the FC SAN on one end, and then provides a standard SCSI parallel connection on the other end. Most applications of FC bridges utilize them to connect SCSI Tape drives to the FC SAN network. Some have suggested that once the tape drive vendors themselves start to ship FC tape drives (something the industry generally expects before year end), that the market will not be as strong for FC bridge products. However it would seem to me that the market could remain as strong as now, or get even stronger. My take is that there are many (older legacy) devices that users will want to connect to their FC SANs now, and perhaps many that they will discover they want to connect as things move forward. For example people are now realizing that you can not only connect what is referred to as a SCSI target device (a "dumb" storage device), but if you turn around the technology you are actually able to connect legacy SCSI initiators (servers) which may not ever have a FC HBA built for it. I can see that this particular application of FC bridges may be significant. (I'm thinking of the larger older HP servers in particular, who may not ever get FC HBAs made for them, but may be pretty important to hook up to the SANs..) Finally Crossroads is not the only company building FC bridges, but they are the one that has most of the dominant OEM relationships for FC bridges (EMC, STK, and probably many more that they describe on their website), as well as the best penetration among SAN integrators. I actually see their name (and FC bridge products) regularly brought up in many SAN design plans.