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Technology Stocks : The New QLogic (ANCR) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Kerry Lee who wrote (11672)	10/22/1997 5:54:00 PM
From: Pigboy	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 29386

FC talk and blabber I recently talked with Michael Chenery from Fujitsu. I believe it is his job to design future interfaces for disk drives. He had some interesting things to say. He said that Fibre Channel is not only better than SCSI bc its faster, works at greater distances, and on different media, it is very important that Fibre Channel allows 126 drives on a Loop, as opposed to 15 for SCSI. Many know that here, but it is a big difference when all of a sudden you can access Terabytes of information. I asked about the difference between RAIDs and JBODs, since both will be used for FC storage. Incidentally, is there a better acronym in the networking world than Just a Bunch of Disks. Absolutely brilliant!! Well, for those that don't know, a JBOD is a bunh of disks used for storage where each drive is individually accessed I believe and with a RAID, drives form a stripe and one drive acts as correction. RAIDs are more reliable because of their fault tolerance (one disk goes down and it doesn't hurt the others) and with JBODs, if you lose a drive, you lose that drives data for good. Therefor, I believe RAIDs will be a lot more common. When I brought up switch makers like Ancor and Brocade, Michael said that Ancor wanted to sell people $40,000 to $50,000 switches and they are way too expensive. From what he heard in the past, Brocade has a totally and completely new approach in trying to sell switches for $5000. I told him that Ancor has recently changed and now they offer a cheaper switch than Brocade and it can do a lot more. He remarked something to the affect that it was good that they were finally paying attention. I do not think he knew too much about switching people, but it was clear that his viewpoint was shaped by someone. I hope the MKII shows up more in the press. He mentioned hubs as being important, and I got the impression Fujitsu might be going there first before working with any switch vendors. Also, I asked his impressions on the future PC and what he thought they would look like. He mentioned that most PC's are moving... AT for physical connection ------------> 1394 internal standard SCSI for high end (buy Adapter Board)--->FC (buy Adapter Board) I had never heard of 1394, but I learn something new everyday. The high end will still go to Fibre Channel. Michael said that it looks like ATM is doomed in the LAN. Also, I asked about where we are with respect to the growth of Fibre Channel and he said that we are at the beginning and that it could be huge. :-) Away from everything else, I got the impression that Brocade's selling point was that they wanted to radically change the Fibre Channel world by coming in and offering significantly cheaper switches. Obviously, a good idea. I think Ancor has changed dramatically recently and is now playing the same game. However, they still have to get the word out in many places--------WE HAVE THE BEST AND CHEAPEST SWITCH NOW! :-) ALL IMHO, please correct me where I am off pigboy