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To: FLSTF97 who wrote (19573)	3/9/2000 3:43:00 PM
From: Greg Hull	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 54805

RE: Fibre Channel Directors Fatboy, <<who is leading in the director market and do they have proprietary architecture>> McData Corporation is the leader of ESCON and Fibre Channel directors today. They recently issued a press release describing their future opportunity. biz.yahoo.com Here are a couple tidbits: <<McDATA manufacturers and markets the industry's leading director switch, the ED-5000 Fibre Channel Director(TM). The high-availability characteristics of the McDATA ED-5000 offers end-users its 99.999 percent availability and makes it the premier choice as the key connectivity component for implementing large-scale SANs, as well as server and storage consolidation. Not only does the ED-5000 Director feature data center-class availability, but it has the necessary scalability for enterprise production environments. McDATA continues to provide the enterprise with a backbone infrastructure solution based on its popular Fibre Channel Director class product.>> <<McDATA Corporation is the leading supplier of data center networking systems, including Fibre Channel Director and switch products for use in enterprise storage applications and services. McDATA offers enterprise-class solutions for open systems that include data center-centric, enterprise-wide network management. McDATA's end-to-end solutions provide IT organizations with the tools and methodologies to implement robust storage area networks. Headquartered in Broomfield, Colorado, McDATA has more than 400 employees worldwide. Information about McDATA can be found at mcdata.com.>> McData's first FC director incorporated Brocade's switches. Recently they denied using any Brocade switches or ASICs in their products, but I have no documentation on this issue. In an earlier posting on FC switches and directors I included comments from Ashok Kumar of Piper Jaffrey on the topic. Here is one of his comments on this topic: "However, when we get to a director class product, 64-port solutions, a single backplane (Ancor) is a superior solution to a cascade (Brocade). We expect large installations to be aggregated on 64-port rather than 16 port modules. Ancor recently announced that they will begin marketing Inrange's 64-port solution by summer. Furthermore the incumbent in this segment, EMC (McData) has a director product that is a weak approximation to a FC switch. It does not feature any E_ or FL_ports. Ancor is well positioned to gain share at the high end. Furthermore, we expect the director class product to represent over half the FC switch revenue market by 2003.<[emphasis mine]" I know very little about their architecture, but I believe buck has talked about them on this thread. Perhaps he or someone else who follows them can do a better job of responding to your question. Greg