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

To: Bob Frasca who wrote (10731)	7/25/2000 9:34:24 AM
From: TigerPaw	Respond to of 17183

McData is out at IBM There has been a couple of rally the troops kind of meetings at IBM plants where they specificly target EMC (vs. shark). I would think they would try to distance their use of EMC products when mounting an offense. TP

To: Bob Frasca who wrote (10731)	7/25/2000 9:47:58 AM
From: Gus	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 17183

That's the 3rd time I heard that cart-before-the-horse rumor during the last few months, Bob. As I understand it, IBM is still rushing to provide FC connectivity to its ESCON installed base so how can it sell FC-based director switches from Inrange already? Mcdata's FICON bridge cards sold exclusively to IBM went from $1 million in revenues during the first half of 1999 to $13.4 million in revenues during the first half of 2000. Mcdata's revenues from IBM (excluding ESCON) went from 2% or revenues in 1998 to 11% in 199 and 15% during the last 2 quarters of 2000. From Mcdata's S 1/A FICON Bridge. We designed and manufacture the FICON(TM) feature card within IBM's 9032 Model 5 Director that functions as a bridge between FICON and ESCON protocols. FICON is designed to provide fibre channel connectivity to mainframe storage devices. FICON takes advantage of the American National Standards Institute fibre channel standard transport with the introduction of IBM's performance-enhancing S/390 layer. The FICON Bridge card helps provide customers with investment protection for currently installed ESCON control units, such as disk storage and tape control units. From the IBM-Mcdata reseller announcement last March: McDATA and IBM have partnered to test and support open robust SANs with IBM's RS/6000 family of servers, including SP and IBM Netfinity attached to the Enterprise Storage Server and IBM MAGSTAR Tape Drives. Future attachments to the McDATA ED-5000 include other IBM tape devices, IBM Numa-Q servers and IBM S/390 servers with native FICON. In addition, the McDATA Director is the first device to support IBM AIX in a switched environment. mcdata.com Note that IBM is using an interesting high-speed switch technology adopted from its supercomputers to position the RS/6000 vs Sun's $1+ million Starfires. It is also rushing a new generation of the venerable S390 (G7) in a few months. Note also that IBM's Tivoli unit is spending something like $1 billion this year on storage management software that will most likely embed Mcdata's RTOS-based EFC Connectivity Management Software (also embedded in EMC's ControlCenter) since this provides port level management of the switched fabric. news.cnet.com Mcdata has shipped over 700,000 ESCON, FICON and FC ports over its lifetime with IBM as the exclusive customer for its ESCON and FICON products so it has a native interoperability advantage that assures them a major spot in the rotation. I can see how IBM could work Inrange into the storage networking rotation eventually especially taking into account some unique features of the Inrange director, but again, before Inrange can sell its FC-based director switches to IBM, Mcdata has to provide the IBM ESCON installed base with FC connectivity.