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Strategies & Market Trends : Gorilla and King Portfolio Candidates -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Heeren Pathak who wrote (25262)	5/24/2000 8:36:00 AM
From: buck	Respond to of 54805

More beating by buck of a not-quite dead horse (give Kumar a few days, and it almost certainly will be): The biggest argument for FC is that it lets you go faster than Ethernet...."breakthrough" technologies that were going to allow LANs to go past the limitations of Ethernet This is a very common misconception. Fibre channel wasn't designed to get around the limitations of ethernet. It was designed to get around the limitations of SCSI, and add a great deal of networking capability to STORAGE. With a couple of exceptions a few years ago (Ancor tried to sell it as a LAN topology and failed miserably), FC has been developed and touted and sold as a way to seperate the storage from the host, allowing both to grow at the rate required by each. Even in a SANs environment, at using Gigabit Ethernet will put the bottleneck in the disk drives and I/O system of the computers. Not the network. NO. WRONG. Fibre channel networks for storage, or SANs, running at 1Gbps, and allowing 100MBps (Mega-BYTES per second) of throughput, have been routinely clocked at 90, 95, even 98MBps. The advantage of FC is aggregation of IO streams, similar in analogy to the recent discussion of fiber and copper (yes, on a different level, but the analogy holds.) There's not an ethernet network in the world that can sustain 90% utilization...that is to say, 90MBps of data throughput for minutes, much less hours, with multiple clients and multiple devices. Remember, the software is ALWAYS behind the hardware by at least a year or so. This is an excellent point. Remember it when you are trying to find an application for the new SoIP standard-that's-not-a-standard for which there is literally ZERO hardware today. In fact, more than anything else, the lack of FC-aware applications have limited the application of SANs. That software is hitting the market today, from makers like Tivoli, CA, Legato, Veritas, Microsoft (thru any number of partners), and others. I respect your decision not to invest in non-ethernet companies. That's your personal choice. The rate boost you speak of has been enough for LANs. LANs do a different job than SANs, though. Lumping the two together just confuses the issue. And like an idiot, I'll be here to keep banging my head against the wall, trying to, at the least, keep the distinction alive. At least until someone announces 10Gbps over common phone line and the existing telephone system, and Ashok Kumar announces the end of all competing technologies. buck PS Don't forget that all this installed infrastructure that everyone wants to use is COPPER...CAT 5 copper wiring. 1Gbps ethernet required fiber optic cable, at least as late as a year or two ago. So the "investment protection" idea is quite disingenuous. And 10GbE is a pipe dream today...the standard won't even be finished until this time in 2002.