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To: Geof Hollingsworth who wrote (22264)	6/13/2000 1:28:00 PM
From: r.edwards	Respond to of 35685

Brocade looks good,BRCD,Brief.Com story Brocade Communications (BRCD) 132 -2 5/16: An important deal for Brocade this morning, as the company teams up with Cisco (CSCO) to connect SANs over IP networks. Sound like techno-trivia? It's not. This deal addresses two key issues for Brocade: potential competition from the networking gorilla, and a huge potential market in metro and wide area SANs. Cisco has not made inroads into the booming storage area network market, but had hinted in its last earnings conference call that it was looking at fibre channel functionality for its Catalyst line of switches. The good news is that Cisco has chosen to partner with Brocade rather than acquire or internally develop competing technology. Having Cisco as a partner rather than a competitor is always desirable. Just as important is the push that this will give Brocade the company and fibre channel the technology into the wide area networking market. Thus far, fibre channel SANs have largely been confined to corporate offices or campuses and have not spanned wide area networks. This is the next huge market for fibre channel, but it is critical that the technology can be delivered using the current data communications infrastructure, which is largely based on IP and ATM traffic. In allowing fibre channel traffic to travel over IP networks, Brocade now sees the potential for SANs becoming metro and wide area. With the increase in fiber capacity, there will be adequate bandwidth to operate SANs over wide areas, and even to eventually outsource storage. With Brocade owning over 90% of the fibre channel switch market, this transition to wide area SANs opens enormous potential. This announcement should also help to ease the concerns prompted by the May 22 BRCD downgrade by USB Piper Jaffray analyst Ashok Kumar, who argued that fibre channel technology was threatened by privately held Nishan's SoIP (storage over IP) technology. Today's Cisco partnership does not end this threat, but delivering fibre channel traffic over IP removes one of the weaknesses of fibre channel -- that it wasn't compatible with the existing telecom infrastructure. - Greg Jones, Briefing.com