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

To: Pigboy who wrote (3504)	1/15/1998 5:41:00 PM
From: Lerxst	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 6980

pigboy, Re: storage area networks, I'm not familiar with the efforts of HP, Compaq, etc. However, iff the SAN truly became an integral part of the network, not just a network-like adjunct, then I'd imagine the networkers would eventually get involved. My own opinion, I haven't a clue as to Bay's official opinion. My first guess at a SAN would be that you have a dedicated hardware interface between the SAN and the LAN/WAN, you could think of this like the first routers, connecting disparate networks together. The industry seems to be moving away from such a model as the "network". I would view a fiber channel "san" as simply an evolutionary SCSI connection. FC may look, feel and smell like a network, but that doesn't make it so. Today's NFS servers have an ethernet connection into the box which then connects to a bunch of disk drives on SCSI (largely). Is the SCSI connection considered part of the "network"? Nope. I think the same is true for drives connected via FC. I would argue that if the SAN was to become part of the network, why not implement it with IP over Gig Enet or ATM or POS? Please note, this is largely conjecture on my part and I really should read up on this, but this is my opinion (again, for what it's worth ;-). Regards, Lerxst