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Technology Stocks : Son of SAN - Storage Networking Technologies -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Joe Wagner who wrote (3130)	4/18/2001 9:40:39 AM
From: David A. Lethe	Respond to of 4808

Joe/Others: FC is FINE for video, IF it is done properly. Remember "video" has multiple niches .. prepress, postpress, broadcast (digital for HDTV, or analog). All have different bandwidth, availability, security, connectivity, and price/performance requirements. A graphic artist editing an episode of Southpark has very different needs than a broadcast stating pumping HDTV images of a live event to a satellite. EMC, NetApps, BlueArc, MTI play in different areas, and there is certainly overlap. iSCSI will play in some areas here quite nicely as well. Consider Disney. If their CTO bought any one of these vendors products for 100% of their needs, than that person would be fired. Re: your LIP problem with FC, you need to use fabric instead of arbitrated loop (both different "ways" to send FC data), and have a storage subsystem that won't interrupt data flow, or let it go under a certain sustained transfer threshold in event of a problem. Then of course, you must configure your switches properly and have plenty of redundancy to handle switch failures and human errors like bozos unplugging the wrong cable. The trick is, you need to know what products are best in each environment. Like any technology, one can not make sweeping statements that it is "best" to solve a problem such as video. Maybe I am a bit anal about this, but I've seen people fired for NOT understanding there is a right way and a wrong way to deploy this technology, as well as thinking that any component with a FC port will do just fine. As investors, you don't need to bits & bytes, but you should at least be aware that one vendor's solution is not universal. This goes for FC, as well as iSCSI, IB, ESCON, ethernet, and so on. Until now, I haven't gone into SCSI (or should I say parallel SCSI, because FC is serial SCSI), but SCSI plays well in SAN and market today, and will significantly outperform FC if it is done right. The thread is storage networking technologies, not fibrechannel cheerleaders.