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 : Extreme Networks, Inc. (EXTR) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Jill who wrote (315)	10/7/2000 7:18:09 PM
From: A.L. Reagan	Respond to of 770

There is some vulnerability to decline in CLEC spending for EXTR's GigE MAN products. Just something to watch for in the earnings CC. Not a huge part of the business here, but in this skittish environment any hint of bad news can cause a decapitation of the high P/E issues. Possibly the same thing can be said about corporate America w/r/t enterprise LAN's - possibly if the aggregate rate of corp PC growth is slowing, a la Dell, and the world is not exactly racing to embrace MS-2000, there is some spillover impact on spending on networking hardware. Dunno whether big corps will decide that, for a while at least, the amount of bandwith provided to their Dilberts via the enterprise LAN is adequate as is. Stuff like this could happen... or not. On a longer-term basis, here's a competing technology that may, or may not, challenge GigE in the MAN: Switching platforms could challenge Gigabit Ethernet in metro networks -- Quad Research takes Fibre Channel to the Web Oct. 06, 2000 (Electronic Engineering Times - CMP via COMTEX) -- Irvine, Calif. - If the Gigabit Ethernet switching community can reinvent itself to handle Web front-end duties, can the Fibre Channel world be far behind? Quad Research hopes to be the first Fibre Channel specialist to take on that challenge as it launches special platforms for service providers aimed at optimizing Web servers for streaming-media delivery by using switched Fibre Channel links. Michael Pagani, vice president of marketing at Quad, said that the 1System and MovieServ switching platforms launched at the NetWorld+Interop show last month were not merely Fibre Channel switches oriented toward storage area networks used in server farms. Quad's intent is to bring the Fibre Channel protocol directly into service-provider communities. In the future, the company hopes to use Fibre Channel as a metropolitan area networking alternative to Gigabit Ethernet and Sonet. "We're putting the Fibre Channel fabric into the Web hosting layer, between the router and the application servers," Pagani said. "Customers tell us they are adding more servers than anticipated, because of the processor-dependent architectures in most Web-hosting systems. By shifting from a discrete-transaction model dependent on the I/O processor to a session-oriented request, you can support streaming media more consistently." Quad Research can offer 1-Gbit links right now and will move to 2-Gbit systems as soon as controllers are ready at year's end from its partner, QLogic Systems Inc. The Quad system uses dual 750-MHz Pentiums as the host processor for the server system, but that host only sets up initial sessions for the RISC-based Fibre Channel controllers, which then take over all I/O duties. The systems can be attached to Ethernet-frame-based networks as well, though the best throughput comes in native Fibre Channel systems. The 1System server is designed for general Internet Service Provider and Application Service Provider use, while MovieServ, running Windows Media Services, is intended more for streaming-video specialists. Customers in the latter environment can use the swappability features of the Compact PCI cards of the systems to add subscribers and new services to the network. Pagani said Quad anticipates selling its servers directly against standard Unix and Linux servers designed for service-provider networks, such as the Sun Microsystems Inc. Netra family running Solaris. The larger Model 0510, the system preferred in MovieServ configurations, has ten Compact PCI slots and five Fibre Channel disk drive slots. A smaller system, the 1502, has two cPCI slots and 15 Fibre Channel slots. Each cPCI slot in both systems has an isolated passive midplane and backplane. The systems can be configured with full Network Equipment Building Standards ruggedization features and are designed for standard telco 19-inch racks. The servers are in trials at specialized carriers and will be offered for commercial shipment in the first quarter of 2001. eetimes.com -------------------------------------------------------- EDIT: Suspect that for a good while at least GigE will have the edge due to (a) being an established standard; (b) interoperability; and (c) cost. But there's always somebody claiming a better mousetrap.