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

To: Ed Schultz who wrote (13895)	1/27/1998 1:00:00 PM
From: janski	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 29386

And just as you thought FC was going to explode any minute.. good thing that Brocade is around to promote it. January 26, 1998, Issue: 699 Section: News & Analysis Switched SCSI Set To Battle Fibre Chuck Moozakis Gigalabs Inc. hopes to breathe new life into legacy SCSI connections this week when it ships an I/O switch the company claims will propel SCSI to compete head-on with Fibre Channel. Although SCSI is installed in more than 90 percent of networks, throughput, distance and contention shortfalls have caused network managers to examine alternative technologies such as Fibre Channel, which can push data through more devices at greater distances and at much higher speeds (100 megabytes per second) than conventional SCSI (40 mega-bytes per second) GigaLabs' new Jigsaw 8 SCSI switch is designed to narrow that performance gap by moving SCSI data traffic independently of the server, thus providing multiple pathways for delivering information and avoiding I/O bottlenecks, said GigaLabs President Kon Leong. In this design, throughput is accelerated as high as 80 megabytes per second, Leong said. Dozens of devices can be linked using cascades, whereas conventional SCSI can attach only 15 devices to a bus. Jigsaw 8 also will support remote mirroring and clustering by using either ATM or Fibre links, Leong said. GigaLabs is working with Microsoft and others to get Cluster Server certification. Storage analyst Michael Peterson, president of Strategic Research Corp., said "GigaLabs is taking a well-established technology and making it robust enough for heterogeneous servers." Still At Issue Interoperability and standardization issues still plague Fibre, Leong said. "There is no assurance of interoperability; SCSI has always promised and delivered forward- and backward-compatibility," he said. Connecting peripherals is another issue. "With Fibre, only a few options exist; with SCSI every peripheral has SCSI ports." But Brenda Christensen, vice president of Brocade Communications Systems who also serves as president of the Fibre Channel Association, said the Fibre vs. SCSI decision is not that cut-and-dried. "We are embracing SCSI and creating an incredibly scalable environment. We have an extraordinary commitment to standards for interoperability." Additionally, said Kumar Malavalli, Brocade's vice president of technology, "Fibre addresses the whole system, from server to storage, and it supports multiple protocols." Data management also is enhanced with Fibre, through its support of simple name server protocol. "Storage management software is embedded right in the [Fibre] switch," he said. The Jigsaw 8 will be priced at $8,000 per port for the fully configured model; NT versions will be about $2,000 a port. It will support SCSI, ATM and HIPPI, with Gigabit Ethernet and Fibre Channel modules available later this year.