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

To: Tony Viola who wrote (10524)	6/21/2000 3:23:00 PM
From: Gus	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 17183

Tony, There's an ESCON director-class switch for the mainframe market and there's a FC-based director-class switch for the mainframe+open systems market. Mcdata continues to be the exclusive supplier to IBM for the ESCON director-class switch market and it has over 85+% market share; although, this is clearly a declining market as evidenced by the growth in FICON (bridge product that provides FC connectivity to the ESCON installed base). Due to EMC's first-mover advantage in SANs, Mcdata has the first-mover advantage in the FC director-class switch market with 99.8% market share. From the Mcdata prospectus: A SAN incorporates one or more classes of networking devices that enable the interconnection of the SAN with server and storage devices. These devices are: - Storage Director -- the backbone device that enables the broadest connectivity of servers and storage devices in a SAN configuration. It has the highest bandwidth performance and provides the highest number of ports per size of device (which is referred to as port density) of all SAN networking devices. A director class switch, unlike other types of SAN networking devices, has fault tolerant technology and redundancy built throughout its design. Storage directors support a fabric configuration and provide a highly available platform for a centralized SAN management system. Directors can be used in configurations that connect large numbers of servers with multi-terabyte storage arrays in either a fabric or arbitrated loop configuration. - Storage Switch -- a device that addresses typical department level requirements to connect a range of server and storage devices with less capability than a director. Storage switches provide increased flexibility in building larger SAN configurations and higher performance than storage hubs. Typical configurations connect a limited number of servers with multi-hundred gigabyte storage arrays.