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

To: Pigboy who wrote (11683)	10/22/1997 7:59:00 PM
From: Craig Stevenson	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 29386

Pigboy, Interesting information from your Fujitsu contact. I'm glad to finally get some support on my view that ATM in the LAN is dead. I can offer something in the way of explanation for why it is important to have support for up to 127 devices on one Fibre Channel Arbitrated Loop. Even Wide SCSI's support for up to 15 devices on a single SCSI bus only allows about 135 Gigabytes of storage capacity using 9 Gig drives. To scale beyond that requires additional SCSI adapters, which many servers don't have available. Fibre Channel increases the device count per adapter by almost an order of magnitude. Another theory that I have is that storage designers will overestimate the number of Fibre Channel devices that can be put on a single loop before performance is impacted negatively. (Much the same way that corporations start with 10 or 100 Megabit Ethernet hubs, and have to move to switches, because of network congestion.) When performance slows down, one solution will be to separate the devices into several, smaller loops, and attach each one to a port on a switch. That's when things could get interesting for Ancor and the other Fibre Channel switch players. Fibre Channel could be huge? I thought this was a "dead company" and that Fibre Channel was too immature. <g> I view the Fibre Channel market as being on a parabolic growth curve. We are just approaching the area where you can start to see it turn up. Craig

To: Pigboy who wrote (11683)	10/23/1997 7:38:00 AM
From: KJ. Moy	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 29386

Pigboy, <<<Brocade has a totally and completely new approach in trying to sell switches for $5000. >>> Thanks for a great post. I can't see a switch from Brocade be this cheap at their today's per port cost. A switch with two ot three ports is not very useful IMO, may as well go point to point. I do see a small switch which uses FC-AL for storage devices and the rest of the switch ports for servers. Small companies may want to use that. That is, they would not need anything more than just a few ports for all their devices. Most bigger companies would need more than one switch to interconnect their servers and storage devices. So, a small switch does not make sense right now. All IMHO. KJ