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

To: Lerxst who wrote (3498)	1/15/1998 4:24:00 PM
From: Pigboy	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 6980

Lerxst, << Yikes, completely forgot about the Fiber channel thing, I've been a bit busy 'round here lately, especially with the holidays. >> No problem. Hope everything is well. :) << I drive a lot of the purchasing (and admin) for the NFS servers that my group runs with and therefore stay on top of the technology. From what the NFS mfr's are telling me, most disk drive co's are working on fiber channel based disk drives. This is a Good Thing. With drive RPM's getting faster and faster, feature size shrinking and read/write head technology exploding (IBM is pretty amazing), a big bottleneck in the I/O chain is the physical interface to the disk. Fiber channel is nice technology for this application, fast speeds, optical transport, etc. This is where I see a direct application of FC flourishing (Fiber Channel Arbitrated Loop). >> Yes, it is good to hear someone who works with the mfr's say this. I have read a great deal of stuff on Fibre Channel for some time, and am pretty familiar with it, but not in a tangible sense at all like you. Yes, the GE people grabed the bottom two layers of the FC specs. What my questions really are about is that it seems pretty clear (from asking people like Hwp and Cpq and Sqnt) that fibre channel is not going to just be an interconnect, but a whole new landscape for networking, specifically storage area networks (SANS). Because storage can throw IP over it with FC, and FC allows for remote storage, this opens up something never seen before. People like eds seem to be in the works of doing some pretty interesting things with FC. It also seems that people like CPQ, HP, SUN and others are coming out with hubs, and switches and stuff soon for FC. Is this something that the the big networkers look to participate in (ie. selling switches, adapter cards, hubs, etc...some day) when FC SANs start to take off 2nd half this year, or do you think this whole field will most likely stay strictly storage (ie. Sun, Hp, Cpq, Emc, Sqnt, etc...)? The FC market is expected to explode revenue wise in a very short time from absolutely no where, per dataquest (which I take with a grain of salt usually). With people like Cisco and Bay very interested in end to end networks, it seems common sense to me that when storage networks take off in the coming years, that this will automatically become part of the equation. If the networkers are interested, will Bay wait until Cisco makes the first move like they have in the past? Those are the questions I am looking to find out. Also, did you have an answer to the IPX question from my last post? Thanks for any thoughts, all imho pigboy