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

To: Joe Wagner who wrote (1624)	11/17/1999 2:30:00 AM
From: George Dawson	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 4808

Joe, I think most projections show that FC and NAS are predicted to share the future storage market fairly equally. The FC companies have a more difficult task since their technology is more complex. I recall realizing that there were less expensive switches with lower latency (eg. Myrinet) for processor clustering applications and hearing that some companies were going to work on latency. The MTIC conference call talked about hybrid systems and you can view some diagrams of these systems on the U of Mn LCSE site. Interestingly, one is built with a Gadzoox hub and a more recent system has a fabric of 4 Brocade Silkworm 2400s attached to 8 JBOD disk arrays. For the NAS approach I would refer to Network Appliances tech page: netapp.com In their product line, the largest disk array I could find approached 1,000 GB. This puts this device in the same ballpark as Sun's StorEdge 5100 and 5200. Sun also advertises the performance of these systems (IOPs and throughput using real data). I don't have similar data for the NAS. I also don't know the costs of these systems which tends to drive things in the real world. You will notice if you read through the Network Appliances web site - they target a lot of the same customers as FC. Another good resource is this article from SunWorld which is a line by line comparison of FC SANs and NAS: sunworld.com There is a lot of cross fertilization in these storage technologies. At higher bandwidths the NAS devices move to FCAL to cluster disks. There are hybrid systems out there right now that attach the high speed network to a SAN rather than traditional NAS. Keeping all this in context, we have to remember the need for backward compatability with all the old stuff, which will mean the 24GB/s FC and the 10 GB/s GE will have to be backward compatible with the 1 gig stuff. At the rate things are going, I think it will take longer than 4 years to get to those speeds. Both NAS and FC are currently selling. George D.