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Technology Stocks : Lucent Technologies (LU) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Kenneth E. Phillipps who wrote (14628)	5/3/2000 8:40:00 AM
From: matt dillabough	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 21876

08:36 [LU] LUCENTS PLANS TO DISPOSE OF POWER SYSTEMS BUSINESS, SEEKING BUYER

To: Kenneth E. Phillipps who wrote (14628)	5/3/2000 5:34:00 PM
From: No_underscores	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 21876

It would be helpful if somebody would explain the pros and cons of Fibre Channel vs. Gigabit Ethernet or 10GB Ethernet as an optical access technology. I may be wrong but I do not remember reading anything about Nortel or Cisco have fibre channel or SAN products. Nortel seems to be pushing gigabit ethernet and 10 gigabit ethernet for optical access. Lucent seems to be involved in both technologies. Well, I'll give it a shot. By the way, anyone who is interested in such matters should get a copy of the March 2000 issue of Red Herring, which had a whole series of articles on STORAGE, an _immensely_ important sector, now and for the foreseeable future. Fibre Channel (FC) is discussed, as well as SANs vs. NAS, hosted storage, new storage technologies, etc. In order for a SAN (storage area network) to be plausible, you need to be able to connect the various components of the SAN with each other (just like the various components of a LAN or WAN are connected) with an extremely fast network technology. Fibre Channel fits the bill by allowing the SAN components to communicate simultaneously over the same optical fiber. The advantage of FC, as I understand it, is in the sophisticated switching technology used to get data on and off of the optical fiber. While fast ethernet can allow for as large of a "pipe" as optical fiber, the switches used with ethernet are not appropriate. I'm not entirely clear on the reason, but apparently switching technology for LANs and WANs is not suitable for SANs. In any case, you're right that companies like Cisco and Nortel are not in the SAN business; they're into networking infrastructure, which is for LANs and WANs. The premier SAN company, bar far, is EMC (which is right up there with CSCO as far as "must have" technology stocks). Network Appliances, Sun and IBM are trying to stay in the game, but they're years behind, from what I've read. All of these companies have to use FC, of course. I'm not sure what you mean by "optical access." Maybe this is something that I would know if I knew more about Lucent's OptiStar(TM) product line. I'd appreciate any insights there. Perhaps I've misunderstood your question, and if so, I apologize. N_u