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Technology Stocks : EMC How high can it go? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: buck who wrote (9612)	3/17/2000 12:01:00 PM
From: Greg Hull	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 17183

buck, Here is what one poster (asic_1) on yahoo says about the McData offerings: messages.yahoo.com "Brocade has 8 and 16 port switches as does Ancor but Ancor also has a 64 port switch. McData makes only a 32 port switch, it is called a director class switch. the McData switch is not built on Brocade technology but is built on McData's. The McData switch and the Brocade switch will not talk to each other. Brocade can connect multiple switches together by using cascading. Cascading is where ports of one switch is connected to ports of another and so on. The problem with this is traffic from one switch must flow over another to get to the destination. because if this a bottleneck happens and traffic is slowed. To over come this bottleneck more ports must be used between switches so more traffic can flow. This method is using ports that should be connected to the customers equipment, so there are less ports and the cost goes up as well as triffic is still slowed. Ancor has cascading as an option but it also has multistage code. Multistage code allows an Ancor switch to be used to interconnect other switches this means in the SAN fabric the traffic is no more than on switch away and because each switch has it's own path through the SAN ther is no bottleneck this is called a NON blocking fabric. Ancor put their 16 port switch on a card and made a high speed backplane to inter connect them put it all in a case and you have a 64 port. Connect the high speed backplane and you now have a 128, 256 and 512. Now comes the word "director class", a director class switch has some options a standard switch does not have. That is the repair person can upgrade or repair the switch without powering it down or affecting the rest of the fabric. Now there is somthing call a "fibre channel director" it is diffrent from a "director class" switch. The "fibre channel director" has a interface (ESCON) that will connect directly into a IBM mainframe computer, the "director class" will not connect to a mainframe. If you want more information look at Ancor's web page. as well as Inrange's "