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

To: Craig Stevenson who wrote (14338)	2/14/1998 9:51:00 PM
From: Pigboy	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 29386

I didn't like the article as much as you guys, but I do think it stated some good things about FC. I liked reading about the realities and hopes of FC, like... << Fibre Channel's raw bandwidth is a little over 1 Gbps. If you take off 20 percent for overhead, you get 800 Mbps (or 100 MBps). Full-duplex (dual-ported), that's 200 MBps. Fibre Channel has plenty of growth potential, too. We could see 10-Gbps Fibre Channel in coming years. Released products have not yet achieved Fibre Channel's theoretical distance limit of 10 kilometers without extenders or repeaters. Early products were often limited to 500 meters. Today's products may go up to 2 km. However, 10 km will come eventually. SCSI is unsuited to long distances, because of the fat cables (50 to 68 wires) necessitated by its parallel architecture. Fibre Channel requires only two wires. That becomes more important as distances increase. >> I did however have some questions about some other things... << SCSI will make it much more difficult for Fibre Channel vendors to get into the mainstream market and achieve the economies of scale they need to compete on price. >> This may be true right now, but when you have giant companies like Compaq going full blown into Fibre Channel soon and dissing making better SCSI products as I have heard from a gentleman at SGI, this problem will soon be moot, no? Please correct me if I am off? << "Today, there are too many incompatibilities between Fibre Channel products from different vendors, and Fibre Channel is not robust enough for most production environments," says Berkshire's Richardson. >> Is this really true? I guess I am too used to looking at Ancor's web page which says they are compatible with almost all the major hub, adapter, RAID makers, etc... And aren't their products plenty robust? What kind of "Robust" is this guy talking about? << Another option for high-speed clustering is ServerNet, from Tandem/Compaq, a full-duplex 40-Mbps interconnect optimized for clustering. >> If someone like CPQ is moving toward FC and they also support ServerNet, I tend to believe they are more compatible than competitive. This has been discussed here, before, no? << For instance, there is no Fibre Channel-to-Ethernet bridge, and you need a SCSI-to-Fibre Channel bridge to use current SCSI devices on a Fibre Channel network>> but he seems to answer this problem just a few lines down with... << Frymoyer (Ed Frymoyer, president of EMF Associates) also says that he expects three Fibre Channel-to-Ethernet bridges within a year. >> I am with you too, Craig. Where is that high performance Ethernet gateway we heard about Ancor making eons ago??? On a separate note Craig, << It can't be terribly difficult to do. The MKII already has an Ethernet port for management. <g> >> Can you explain this one a little further? I did not know this!! Do you know if any competitors have this option and if its very important? I agree with you about the hodge podge future network and how going pure FC will only work with a few select niche fellows at first. Thanks all imho pigboy

To: Craig Stevenson who wrote (14338)	2/14/1998 11:52:00 PM
From: George Dawson	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 29386

"What I would like to see is a small router-like box with one or more Fibre Channel ports on one side and one or more Gigabit Ethernet or a bunch of Fast Ethernet ports on the other side." Craig, I agree this is the optimal solution - in fact this would look like a typical GE switch that seems to have 1-4 GE modules and numerous ethernet/fast ethernet ports. "I agree that the Byte article seems to ignore the Fibre Channel to Ethernet gateway product from Ancor, but this is not really a high-performance solution." Is this because this device has the old ASIC? - it seems to have the right topology otherwise. George D.