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

To: Jay Quinty who wrote (256)	12/29/1997 5:54:00 AM
From: Pigboy	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 4808

Jay and others, I do not know much on those two companies, but I came across a great small article recently about where we are headed. It's in the latest Wired and entitled 'Schumpeter's Lesson', by Steve Steinberg. He basically says that not much has happened in the last five years as far as unpredictability on the network is concerned (ie. IP becoming more popular, WDM, etc... ). The best part of the article, in my opinion, was in the chatter about "network effects"---which is basically a theory that once standards are made, even if they are not superior to others around them, they still become the ground floor and necessity for years and years of progress to sprout from; "existing standards have simply become too pervasive for us to even think about changing them." An excerpt: "The concept (network effects)is not difficult: When, say 10 corporations decide to adopt AC rather than DC as their electrical standard, AC becomes not 10 times, but more like 100 times, more attractive to subsequent decision makers. The result: technology lock-in." Tha article goes on to talk about how easy it should have been to see how things like IP and HTTP have become so dominant and will continue to be so. What relevance has this to the Fibre Channel thread? Well, the article made me feel pretty good about Fibre Channel, because it is what the storage world is clearly moving towards. I think it is clear that fibre channel products will start coming out in full storm in '98, but more importantly, this is a standard that looks fulfilling for many more years to come. A great part of this reason, that is not mentioned much, is the fact that FC supports IP, SCSI, and FC at the same time I believe. This is the most signicant part of the FC equation to me. When I was at a small conference recently, a person from Storage Technologies made two interesting comments. One was that once Seagate (the DiskDrive giant) made what seemed like such a insignificant decision to start putting FC on their drives (rather than anything else--there are a lot of options), it began another industry trend, another "network effect/lock-in", in my opinion. He also said that Fibre Channel can be used on copper and it is usually used with a loop, so therefor, it really is more like the opposite of FC, while something like HIPPI seems more like actual 'fibre channel.' He seemed a little bothered that HIPPI wasn't the new storage 'network effect.' But, FC is. To wrap up, it seems clear to me (again)that FC will take off, but finding the right companies to ride the wave are always another story. Just some thoughts on an empty sunday noon, ALL IMHO pigboy