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To: nick chacos who wrote (18589)	2/24/2000 8:30:00 AM
From: buck	Respond to of 54805

Ah, it warms the cockles of my heart to see all this FC discussion going on. Thanks to Greg and Nick, it seems that the understanding of the space has increased ten-fold. I wanted to jump in with a couple of clarifications: - Director is a marketing term for high port-count switches. It is taken from the mainframe market. The function and operation of a director is precisely the same as a switch...moving data from one port to another as fast as possible. I don't want those interested to become confused by the inclusion of marketecture. - Fibre Channel was invented by IBM in the late 80's as an open systems flavor of ESCON, their mainframe IO standard. They presented it as an ANSI standard and it was adopted. IBM decided to go with SSA, another IO standard, in the mid-90s, and the FC banner was picked up by HP, Sun and others and brought to it's current state. This explains IBM's slow entry to the FC storage market space. It doesn't explain Sun's. <ggg> Again, I want to thank Greg and Nick for adding so much to the FC market space discussion. buck

To: nick chacos who wrote (18589)	2/24/2000 9:14:00 AM
From: Bruce Brown	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 54805

RE: Ancor Thank you Nick for providing some of Ancor's corporate history. That's an interesting financial situation. All of us that were Dell investors in our prior portfolios and are Intel shareholders shudder when Kumar's name is mentioned. The Minneapolis, Minnesota based Piper Jaffray is quite near where Ancor is located in Eden Prairie, Minnesota. I believe it was mentioned by somebody that there was no underwriting or connection between the two. Is that correct? Regardless, Robertson Stephens did do some financing for Brocade and of course one of our book's authors, Paul Johnson, is an important analyst at BancBoston/Robbie Stephens who covers the stock. None of this stands in the way of the game going on in fiber channel switching, I just mention the tidbit. There are four brokerage firms that cover both Ancor and Brocade. The rest only cover one or the other. Ancor is covered by (with 2 strong buys, 4 buys and 1 hold): Banc of America Securities LLC Bear Stearns and Company, Incorporated CO FORECST J.G. Kinnard and Company Morgan Keegan and Company, Incorporated Needham and Company Suntrust Equitable Securities US Bancorp Piper Jaffrey Brocade is covered by (with 3 strong buys, 8 buys and 1 hold): Bear Stearns and Company, Incorporated Dain Rauscher Wessels, Incorporated Deutsche Bank Securities Morgan Keegan and Company, Incorporated Morgan Stanley,Dean Witter and Company Needham and Company Robertson Stephens Salomon Smith Barney, Incorporated S G Cowen Securities Corporation Soundview Technology Group Suntrust Equitable Securities You can visit the web sites of the two fiber channel switch companies at: ancor.com brocade.com BB