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

To: George Dawson who wrote (14118)	2/5/1998 8:32:00 AM
From: Craig Stevenson	Respond to of 29386

George, Regarding the bus bandwidth issue, the February 1998 issue of byte has an article about Symbios Logic, and they discuss the new I2O and 64-bit PCI initiatives. (They also show a Fibre Channel adapter that uses this technology.) According to the article, the combination reduces CPU utilization from 90% to 40%, and dramatically increases the scalability. That means that servers/workstations that use this new bus architecture will be able to saturate gigabit links, whether they are Gigabit Ethernet or Fibre Channel. I also disagree somewhat with Roy's assertion that latency of < 2 microseconds is the key value. In small installations, this may be true, but as things scale up and more traffic goes through the switch, latency becomes an increasingly important issue. I agree with Roy that the interface cards themselves probably can't pump out frames at sub 2 microsecond latency, but the switch has to handle frames from MULTIPLE cards. Craig

To: George Dawson who wrote (14118)	2/5/1998 9:18:00 AM
From: Craig Stevenson	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 29386

George, I saw an ad on page 61 of the latest issue of PC Week that was interesting, and relates to the bandwidth questions. It is from SGI, and is an ad for their Origin Server. It shows a picture of the unit, and gives some of the features: "Full 64-bit system hardware and software" "2-64 GB/sec I/O bandwidth" "Up to 88 Fibrechannels at 100 MB/sec each" "64 MB to 256 GB main memory" "Up to 400 Terabytes online storage" It would seem as if the target market for Ancor Fibre Channel switches has already addressed the bus bandwidth problem. I don't recall if we have talked about SGI as a potential OEM for Ancor or Brocade, but they certainly appear to have the hardware to utilize a switched fabric. Craig