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

To: pprobinson who wrote (3736)	8/2/2001 4:06:23 AM
From: Gus	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 4808

....Do you think the 12000 will ever make it out of beta testing? The useful reference is Sun's ill-fated A7000, its last EMC-killer. The A7000 was based partly on Encore's data-sharing technology which had around 10 years of development work behind it. Sun ended up canceling the A7000 program in late 1999 or early 2000 despite the fact that it had more than 100 "enthusiastic" beta sites. My hunch is that the first few vendors to deploy an unproven platform like the 12000 will will lose market share to other vendors. ....If it does test out, do you think that it will be interoperable with Mcdata's installed base of ED-5000's and 6400's? Yes. ....Does the hot code load feature of Mcdata's directors necessarily make them incompatable with the SW12000? I don't think so. Brocade has a two-fold problem. First, the 12000 is its first switch with this hot code download feature so it is unproven. Secondly, they've sold a lot of switches without the non-disruptive code load feature so a Brocade customer has to manually upgrade each switch out in the field. If I'm not mistaken, the entire switch has to go offline for the manual upgrade so that means the servers and storage attached to switch go offline too. This is probably why that German bank with the 284-switch SAN from Brocade decided to buy more McData switches instead. ....Or is Brocade looking to market this switch to the masses of Compaq customers who may be buying their first director and are not so concerned with RAS? I don't understand the question. A director port is more expensive than a regular fabric switch port because it allows much fewer ISLs, provides better performance and RAS. That's one of the pillars of the foundation for functional storage management software. That's why MCDTA booked $4.8M of software/services revenue last quarter and is on track to reach the $10M software/services milestone by 4Q2001 or 1Q2002.