Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

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

To: John Carragher who wrote (10391)	6/10/2000 2:45:00 PM
From: Gus	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 17183

Cool! This is a 1997 background article on McData. McData wraps up its switch to Fibre Channel By Loring Wirbel BROOMFIELD, Colo. -- As it enters its 15th year of business, McData Corp. is completing its transition from a manufacturer of cluster controllers and channel gateways for IBM mainframes to a specialist in Fibre Channel switching. The EMC Corp. subsidiary is defining a niche as a manufacturer of enterprise-level fault-tolerant Fibre Channel switches. McData is preaching more collaboration than competition with those closest to its architectural concepts. It is launching interoperability tests with Brocade Communications Systems Inc. (Santa Clara, Calif.), Jaycor Networks Inc. (San Diego) and Essential Communications Inc. (Albuquerque, N.M.), with demonstration testbeds slated to be shown at the upcoming NetWorld+Interop in Atlanta. And McData's ES-4000 enterprise switch, which debuts this month, makes use of technology adopted on an OEM basis from Brocade. "Fibre Channel switching is still a small enough niche that we are more interested in validating the market than in direct competition," said McData president Jack McDonnell. When the American National Standards Institute finished the Fibre Channel standard nearly five years ago, proponents touted three topologies possible with the gigabit technology: point-to-point links, switching fabrics and arbitrated loops. But arbitrated loops proved so popular in mass-storage and server-cluster applications that a special industry group--the Fibre Channel Loop Community--sprung up around them, and chip vendors optimized products for them. Switches and serial links were all but forgotten. The trend shifted in early 1996, as Hewlett-Packard Co. introduced a quarter-speed (266-Mbit/second) workgroup switch from its Canadian Networks Operation (CNO) and as newcomer Brocade demonstrated new switching architectures. McData developers realized the technology employed in the mainframe world for Escon--the semi-open fiber-optic channel standard originally defined by IBM--could easily be shifted to Fibre Channel. [comment: McData was reorganized in 1997 into McData Holdings and McData. EMC owns 100% of McData Holdings, which in turn, owns about 85% of McData.] The full redundancy and failover features expected for data-center applications could be translated from the Escon to the Fibre Channel worlds, the developers reasoned. Fibre Channel specialists had yet to focus on fault-tolerant system implementations. McData was not hurting for business when EMC came courting in late 1995. IBM had signed an exclusive OEM pact with McData for manufacture of the Escon Director switch, and the agreement remained healthy even after IBM arch-rival EMC acquired McData.Counting the IBM OEM business, McData has a 90 percent market share of Escon products. [comment: Like most everything in the high-performance world, product transitions tend to take time. After peaking at $189M (sales) in 1997, McData registered sales of $179M in 1998, $143M in 1999 and $39M in the 1Q2000, reflecting the impact of Y2K on the IBM mainframe-compatible market.] There were also legacy cluster and channel-processor orders, though McData had sold all interests in future SNA-to-TCP/IP products to Compuware early in 1995. McData contributed more than $200 million to EMC's $2 billion-plus net revenue in fiscal 1996, and the subsidiary employs more than 200 at its Colorado headquarters. The current McData product mix, heavily weighted to the OEM version of the IBM Escon Director, should shift to reflect a healthy Fibre Channel product percentage by mid- to late 1998, McDonnell predicted. Following the company's acquisition by EMC in November 1995, McDonnell developed a plan for moving the bulk of business to Fibre Channel. With EMC's blessing, McData acquired HP's Canadian Networks Operation in the spring, immediately gaining access to a small workgroup switch. That 16-port switch has been integrated into the McData product line, becoming the DS-1000. McData retains some 15 CNO employees in North York, Ontario (near Toronto), and hopes to add five or six more ASIC engineers to accelerate work on workgroup Fibre Channel switches. The CNO technology was not used for larger systems. McData had been developing an architecture in which a large matrix switch controlled three Fibre Channel switches, one of which served as a standby that would fill in if one of the two primary switches failed. To speed time-to-market, the company used Brocade modules as the three direct switches, adding its own matrix-switch controller on top. The resultant product, the ES-4000, is shipping to early beta sites this month and will be shown at NetWorld+Interop in October. McData is moving to establish an international presence for the DS-1600 and ES-4000; it has signed with Data Media Products Inc. to distribute the products in Japan. McData expects switched Fibre Channel will do more than hold its own in the data center against switched Gigabit Ethernet backbones, particularly for large file-transfer or transaction-processing duties. "We see Gigabit Ethernet as a complementary technology to Fibre Channel," McDonnell said. "The Ethernet frame was never designed for large block transfers of data. . . . "Fibre Channel was designed from the beginning for efficient higher-layer protocol handling, including IP protocols." [comment: Gigabit Ethernet standards are scheduled to be nailed down in 2002.] Monika King, product manager for the new enterprise products at McData, said the compact chassis design of the system should win the attention of MIS managers with mixed data centers encompassing mainframe, Unix and Windows NT environments. At the top of the system is a Compaq laptop PC that runs browser-based switch-management software. The matrix switch resides in racks below the PC, and the three Fibre Channel switches are stacked below the main matrix. In future versions, McData may replace the Brocade modules with its own technology. McData designed its management software to alert the user whenever one of the main switches fails and to shift over the standby switch with less than 2 æs of latency. Users can determine failover criteria on their own through management-system commands, and the failover graphs are displayed to the user on the PC. King cited two sets of potential customers: "The Escon Director customer understands the need for redundancy immediately. The Pentium-based server manufacturers are just learning about fault-tolerant systems, but they quickly grasp the need for it in the data center. We feel it is easier for an Escon switching specialist to move a failover architecture to Fibre Channel than for the arbitrated-loop companies in Fibre Channel to move to enterprise switching." [comment: That kind of architectural advantage tends to be measured in years. McData currently has 99.8% of the Director switch market. More competition is obviously coming but there's a 10/99 benchmark study on the McData website that compares McData's ED500 with the Brocade Silkworms and shows the deep differences in design philosophy. EMC is using McData Director switches as part of its Connectrix solutions, if I'm not mistaken. ] eet.com