SI
SI
discoversearch

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor.  We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community.  If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.
Technology Stocks : Harmonic Lightwaves (HLIT) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?


To: J Fieb who wrote (3249)1/22/2000 12:19:00 PM
From: Joe Wagner  Respond to of 4134
 
J., This picture is getting clearer everyday. I woke up this morning and was thinking about Optical SANs (I don't always wake up thinking about technology) and what the implications were of this. This article kind of confirms my thoughts. I was originally thinking of the Optical SAN as DWDM connected to electronic FC SANS, that were connected to WDM backbones. Then thought about the word Optical SAN, and started wondering if the Fibre Channel ASIC could be converted into an optical ASIC with optical storage/severs/NAS, and even an optical CPU with an optical FC Switch built into the CPU. This would truly be an all Optical "Lightning Fast" SAN. It might be interesting to research the progress in optics to see how they build optical routers and if optical asics are a possibility, and are being worked on. I imagine brocade would use software in an optical environment. Sounds like Brocade is already trying to find ways to merge their technology better with optical technology. The ultimate future network would be all optical, even your computer.

By the way, if the whole network becomes an Optical SAN, then a device attached to this network, NAS, would be part of the SAN.

Regards,
Joe

P.S. You beat me to posting this article, it was the first thing I saw this morning when I logged on to my.yahoo. news page, and I went to this thread to post it. It is funny how I woke up thinking about this, this morning, and here this article is about Brocade working with Optical Networks.



To: J Fieb who wrote (3249)1/23/2000 12:29:00 AM
From: Joe Wagner  Respond to of 4134
 
J.Fieb, You have been posting some great articles lately across SI, right on the leading edge of what is happening.

Cheers,

Joe



To: J Fieb who wrote (3249)1/26/2000 12:27:00 AM
From: Joe Wagner  Read Replies (1) | Respond to of 4134
 
J. I think one of the biggest misperceptions about companies like Harmonic, is that this big build out, or upgrade of the cable networks will eventually be over with, and then what? I think each new level of upgrade builds a base for a higher level. Five or ten years from now Teleimmersion/Telepresence with Holographic Displays will start to emerge, and the push for more bandwidth will continue unabated. Can you imagine a guy in 1986 telling his coworkers that in year 2000 he thinks 10GB hard drives just might not satisfy the needs of the average computer user, using it at home for his computing requirements. They would have said it didn't matter anyways because how many people could afford something like that, or the workstation computing power that would come with it? Most people back then would have thought a guy like that was nuts, "10MB is more than enough for a hard drive, why would someone need 1000 of these 10MB drives" Why would they keep big spreadsheets, and huge data bases? Now days we know about digital video and more & more realistic graphics being injected into the networked computer experience, and the growing "blob" of software DNA and stored memories of the collective mind of society. I think we should expect similar analogies by the end of this decade about how small 10GB drives were and how we didn't anticpate some of the applications that will come about as our computing & communication resources grow dramatically. The AOL Time Warner merger is just the start of something very big. Just kind of thinking out loud here.