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Technology Stocks : BAY Ntwks (under House) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Lerxst who wrote (3130)	12/13/1997 10:43:00 AM
From: Doug	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 6980

Hi Lerxst: Many thanks for an your very informed response to my questionnaire. The clarifications to the "hecks" raised are as follows: a: By "system upgrade" I meant an upgrade of an existing total network system. I was interested to know the percentage of Sales for Individual bits of hardware vrs that for "Total system" sales. b:An Adaptive Router is a Router that that has auto path selection capability to fully optimise path routes taking into account the dynamic state of the network and generally uses Parallel Computing power. c:I was refering to an IP switch as a Layer 3 switch. d:My understanding was that the rate of market growth for Hubs& Routers is decreasing whilst that for IP Switches is increasing. I was merely seeking confirmation. Your assumption that 60 Gbps refers to 60 Gigabits per sec is correct.CSCO was hoping to blow the competition away with this if it could speed its development. e:Regards techie hrs, I was interested to know what percentage of techie hrs (Total Sales,Installation,Development,Servicing,R&D) is spent on the ISP,Enterprise and Telco's. This will help me to better determine the market in each sector. Some enterprises have begun switching to Virtual LAN's operated by the Telco's and I was wondering if that is a start of a trend. I look forward to your reply. Regards.

To: Lerxst who wrote (3130)	12/13/1997 7:34:00 PM
From: Pigboy	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 6980

Lersxt, I have started following the Bay thread recently and I think your posts have been very informative. Thanks. I was wondering what Bay or the Networking people were thinking about the new wave of Fibre Channel storage products that will hit the waves like a tsunami over the next year? As I am sure that you know, on one end of the server, you get the Ethernet (FE, GE), ATM, or Token Ring. But on the other end of the server, you have Storage. Until recently, people didn't look at Storage as a networking opportunity, but it seems clear to me that "back-end" networks will become common someday. Fibre Channel is the next step in storage and unlike SCSI, it allows for the explosion of the SAN (storage area network) for a number of reasons from what i gather... 1.It can throw SCSI, FC, and "IP" around the storage environment. 2.It works at great distances over SCSI (10km) so storage can be in another building AND connected to your network. 3. It is much faster than SCSI and Ultra-SCSI 4. It works on copper and fibre 5. It allows 126 drives on a loop (as opposed for 15 for SCSI). 6. It will be on the major storage peoples drives (ie. now SEG is making FC RAIDs, Not anything else). 7. FC seems to compliment Ethernet and ATM. I believe some of the switch companies are working on ATM and Ethernet interconnects (routers??). Sorry to blab, but I am a little excited about the possibilities of SANs getting into the mainstream early next year with the likes of DEC, SUNW, HP, Compaq and others most likely offering hubs, switches, adapter cards, etc... There seems to be only a limited about of companies that make good products-- Fabric Switches --Ancor, Brocade, Arcxel Hubs --Gadzoox, Vixel, Emulex Many adapter card and controller companies. Most of these companies are private. I have spoken with people from most of these companies and per a recent convo with the marketing guy at gadzoox, he says that 3Com and Cisco have started to get interested. I asked about Asnd and Bay and he said something like "Not that he is aware of." Would it be practical for the Networking people like Bay, COMS, Cisco, Asnd to be looking at Fibre Channel or will storage area networking most likely go the way of the HPs, Compaqs, and Suns (ie. they have a better chance in acquiring access to the Fibre Channel game when it takes off.) Would love any opinions? Thanks pigboy

To: Lerxst who wrote (3130)	12/13/1997 9:41:00 PM
From: Mang Cheng	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 6980

A good review for BAY - "MegaSwitch not manageable" : **************************************************************** "MegaSwitch not manageable" By Ken Wold December 12, 1997 PC Week Blazing performance should catapult Nbase Communications Inc.'s new NH3016 MegaSwitch G to the fore of the crowded switch race, but a clunky command line-driven management interface makes this dragster seem as if it were built without a steering wheel. Despite the MegaSwitch's speed and attractive price, PC Week Labs thinks network administrators should spend a little more money to get Bay Network Inc.'s BayStack 350T switch, as the equally zippy Porsche-like rival's well-crafted management interface makes a significant difference. Equipped with 16 Fast Ethernet ports, the NH3016 MegaSwitch G shipped in October for $3,495, which is about $218 per port. (A 24-port version is reportedly in the works.) In comparison, the BayStack 350T's price of $3,995 works out to $249 per port. PC Week Labs pitted the MegaSwitch against Bay Networks' BayStack 350T and found both to be barn-burners in performance. Interestingly, our tests showed the two switches posting almost identical numbers, even though Nbase claims the MegaSwitch can handle 2 million packets per second, compared with the BayStack's advertised 1.6 million packets per second. We used Ziff-Davis Benchmark Operations' NetBench 4.01 to measure each switch's performance, handling the traffic generated by 120 Dell Computer Corp. Dimension XPS 200n Pentium Pro machines sending and requesting various packet sizes from a Dell PowerEdge 4200 equipped with 256MB of RAM and dual 300MHz Pentium II processors, all on one subnet. We ran tests in full-duplex mode with all the clients and the server using Intel Corp.'s Pro100B NIC. Even with all of the traffic these machines were generating, not a single packet was lost and we could find no seepage from either switch. Our conclusion: Both the MegaSwitch and the BayStack seem to be voracious beasts when it comes to passing packets. Unmanageable management? Our biggest complaint with the MegaSwitch is its management interface, which reminded us of Cisco Systems Inc.'s Internetworking Operating System, but with much less functionality. For example, we had to make 32 entries in the MegaSwitch's call level interface simply to change the 16 ports from 10M-bps half duplex to 100M-bps full duplex. In contrast with the BayStack switch, we simply selected the "all" feature in the Port Configuration menu, which changed all 16 ports simultaneously. We also noticed a problem getting the MegaSwitch to remain in full-duplex mode during our testing. Every so often, one or two of the MegaSwitch's ports would revert from full duplex back to half, even though we made sure to disable autosensing on each port. We had to stop our testing and go back into the management interface to force the port back into full-duplex mode. In addition, we were disappointed to discover that the MegaSwitch does not support a redundant power supply. (The BayStack also lacks such redundancy.) On the plus side, we liked the fact that the MegaSwitch offers built-in RMON capability, as does its Bay Networks' rival, and that both switches support centralized management. Nbase offers its MegaVision management software for around $495, while the BayStack 350T hooks into its highly capable Optivity management environment sibling, which costs $5,000 to $18,000. Both switches support VLAN (virtual LAN) connectivity. However, here again we preferred the BayStack's point-and-shoot approach to setting up a VLAN over the ASCII art we had to grapple with in the MegaSwitch in order to construct a VLAN. 1997 ZDNet.