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To: J Fieb who wrote (25851)	1/29/2000 3:10:00 PM
From: George Dawson	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 29386

JFieb, Looks to me like an oversimplification. Their description of what they consider to be a switch sounds more like a director or storage server. I am sure EMC would not describe their Connectrix as a "switch": emc.com I think that Technocrat's posts here more accurately capture the likely progression and the importance of software. The pure switches will be integrated into an overall system where proprietary software will be the key to functionality and integration. Many of these will be turnkey solutions. George

To: J Fieb who wrote (25851)	1/30/2000 3:33:00 PM
From: buck	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 29386

"Switches: To us this seems like the most natural solution, although it will be at least 18 months before we expect to see switches that are robust enough to effectively manage a SAN (EMCs Connectrix comes the closest). If a switch was beefed up by adding various software and hardwaare features and functions, we believe a switch would be a very efficient SAN manager." I, and others, disagree with this statement for the following reason: a switch, whether director-class or otherwise, SHOULD be devoted to one thing, and one thing only, and that's switching traffic between ports. Anything that subtracts cycles from that is not good. Now, if we get to the point that Ethernet is at now and we have programmable ASICs that allow for policy to be implemented at the frame level, AND we have cycles left over to do policy on a per-port basis, then we can offload management to a switch. It took 3Com, Nortel, and Cisco a long time to get to the point they are at now with programmable ASICs. What is exciting to me is how much of that knowledge can be ported to a FC environment. And who's going to do it. Upon previewing, it appears to me that I have stated exactly what you said to begin with..."IF we can beef up the switch."