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Technology Stocks : Son of SAN - Storage Networking Technologies -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Joe Wagner who wrote (1532)	10/24/1999 4:52:00 PM
From: J Fieb	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 4808

J.W., Re; It could be a sea change of "SAN MANIA" coming and my seats are right up front. When the SAN Fans start swarming the stadium it will be quite a site/sight.... great discription! SAN MANIA(tm) Coming soon to a theatre near you! Unless you don't have a seat.

To: Joe Wagner who wrote (1532)	10/25/1999 6:38:00 PM
From: Douglas Nordgren	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 4808

I like you guys' enthusiasm. Let me share mine, along with some random observations. It is a certainty that the Fibre Channel market is growing (at least FC companies are making more and losing less), but as the number of competitors increases, prices are sure to drop. The market will seek price\performance advantages on a per port cost basis. The next generation of fibre channel ASIC port density should address that demand and will gain a competitive edge for the company that brings it to market firstest and bestest. Looking far forward, the arrival of fiber capacity to the last mile dailynews.yahoo.com and the advent of server and storage farms across the internet and within metro rings ensures a burgeoning SAN market for many years to come. Fibre channel engineering will also migrate to the Next Generation I/O server and peripheral market. All the research, knowledge, and insight glimned from years of following fibre channel reduces us to the simple admission that "We haven't seen anything yet." This is no flash in the pan technology. As several posters have noted, the early SAN revenue ramp will occur intitially and rapidly within Unix enterprise and internet related companies. Sun, of course, sells the most fibre channel in that market and plans to continue to dominate with its newer "double capacity, higher performance, and at 50% better price/performance" SAN products. biz.yahoo.com. NT fibre channel implementations will run a distant second in SAN revenues until maybe Windows 2001 comes out in 2002? Meanwhile, Dell is eating lunch and Compaq is being lunch. biz.yahoo.com There's no doubt in my mind that Dell could become a market leader in lowend/midrange NT SAN sales. EMC doesn't have anything like Storage Domain Manager, the complete hetereogeneous version due out next year. This gives Dell a long term advantage when the "departmental" SANs (recall the rollout of LANs) meet the enterprise at the edge. Complete interoperability between switches will be critical at that juncture as the day of single vendor solutions is long gone. When Dell meets the enterprise, the question will be: can Brocade and Ancor switches interoperate within/across a fabric? Moves towards industry standards lend support to that capability. Until then, Dell may be considering dual sourcing for the enterprise market, and not only in switches. Dell is in the unenviable position of sourcing its SAN storage component from a major competitor. EMC will not threaten their bite of Dell's pie, but Dell's Michael Lambert, senior vice president of Dell's Enterprise Systems Group, says ``We're investing for the long-haul and will continue to do that until we reach our goal of becoming one of the top three storage providers in the world.' Mere speculation on my part, but MTIC could make a likely addition to Dell's Enterprise Systems Group - why OEM when the price is right to buy the enterprise? Going toe to toe with EMC at the high end too seems pugnacious. But didn't EMC just get into the ring with Dell for the midrange bout? Speaking of EMC, they are not at all happy with declining McData sales. It looks like price\performance is coming into play to stay. Pricey is becoming dicey in an increasingly non-captive market. Change is in the air, and we have next month's Comdex fibre channel showcase to stir up some more wind. biz.yahoo.com "Within the demonstration, all exhibitor islands are interconnected to the live SAN via Fibre Channel connectivity solutions and comply with premise wiring standards. Furthermore, each island will feature individual demonstrations of new Fibre Channel enabling solutions, including storage, analysis/monitoring, connectivity and networking topologies." After the last Networld Interop, I had a passing wish to see something like this at the next N+I, but Comdex is sooner and more widely attended. Fibre channel is like having a genie when wishes come true. Just another fibre channel pundit spouting off, Douglas