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Technology Stocks : McData (MCDT) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Gus who wrote (59)	9/7/2000 3:46:49 AM
From: Gus	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 234

Here's an excerpt from a 1998 industry white paper that provides some useful perspective about today's SANs. As with ESCON, watching the way the customers deploy and re-architect their IT infrastructures around fibre channel leads to many other investing ideas. STORAGE AREA NETWORKING The Next Network By: Michael Peterson - Strategic Research Corporation January 1998 sresearch.com As distributed networks are re-engineered to achieve continuous operations and to host mission critical applications, a common data center technology is being applied to them. Data centers use a network storage interface called ESCON to connect mainframes to multiple storage systems and distributed networks. This type of network is called a Storage Area Network (SAN). SANs are employed by mainframe data centers and account for approximately 25% of all network traffic. What is new is that SAN architectures are now being adopted in distributed networks out of low cost SAN technologies such as SCSI, SSA, and Fibre Channel. WHAT IS A SAN? It is a high speed network, similar to a LAN, that establishes a direct connection between storage elements and servers or clients. The SAN is an extended, storage bus which can be interconnected using similar interconnect technologies as LANs or WANs: routers, hubs, switches, and gateways. A SAN can be local or remote, shared or dedicated, and uniquely includes externalized and central storage and SAN interconnect components. SAN interfaces are generally ESCON, SCSI, SSA, HIPPI, or Fibre Channel, rather than Ethernet. *It doesn't matter whether a SAN is called a Storage Area Network or System Area Network, the architecture is the same in either case.* SANs create a method of attaching storage that is revolutionizing the network because of the improvements in availability and performance. SANs are currently used to connect shared storage arrays, clustered servers for failover, interconnect mainframe disk or tape resources to distributed network servers and clients, and to create parallel or alternate data paths for high performance computing environments. In essence, a SAN is nothing more than another network, like a subnet, but constructed from storage interfaces. SANs enable storage to be externalized from the server and in doing so, allow storage to be shared among multiple 'host' servers without impacting system performance or the primary network. *The benefits are well proven as this architecture emerges from mainframe DASD. It is nothing new.* In fact, the DEC VMS network environment is based on SAN architectures and clustered servers. EMC already has a large installed base of SAN attached arrays (Symetrix) and has achieved such a high level of customer confidence that they are the standard of comparison. *So, what's new? This important technology is moving into the mainstream in distributed networking and will be the normal, adopted way of attaching and sharing storage within a few short years.* Often referred to as the "network behind the server", SANs represents a new model that has evolved with the advent of shared, multi-host connected enterprise storage. A SAN bypasses traditional network bottlenecks and supports direct, high-speed data transfer in 3 different ways: server-to-storage server-to-server storage-to-storage