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

To: Pigboy who wrote (14342)	2/14/1998 10:12:00 PM
From: Craig Stevenson	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 29386

Pigboy, I think you are correct about the future of Fibre Channel, but don't expect the SCSI guys to give up without a fight. There is a HUGE installed base of SCSI out there, and there will be a tremendous effort to protect that investment for years to come. I still believe Fibre Channel will eventually win out because of several technical advantages. As far as the Ethernet port on the MKII, take a look at this page from Ancor's web site: ancor.com The relevant portion is under the "Ease of Management and Use" section: "Web-based and/or SNMP management available through Ancor's GigVision products" "Embedded Ethernet port for management, RS232 interface" In the specifications section, this is explained a little more: "Maintenance port: RS232 interface, Ethernet 10/100 with RJ45" The reason this is important is because of the way switches are managed. I will use an Ethernet analogy, since that is what I am most familiar with. My BayStack 350T 10/100 Ethernet switch can be managed in two ways. 1. By using the built-in console port. You attach it to a terminal, or a laptop via a serial cable. The laptop can run a communications program like Procomm, or Windows Terminal. It is all text based. 2. By using Telnet (TCP/IP). The problem here is that if the switch is not correctly configured from the factory for YOUR network, you can't Telnet into it. So, you are forced to use the console port to set the TCP/IP address and the netmask. Then, you can telnet into the switch. My Bay switch didn't even have an address programmed into it, so this was the only way to get it to work that way. If you think about a Fibre Channel switch, even if the console (RS232) port was used to do the initial configuration, there would be no way to effectively manage the switch from a laptop (They don't have Fibre Channel ports), or from any machine that didn't have access to the Fibre Channel network. So, the obvious answer was to add an Ethernet/Fast Ethernet (10/100) port to the MKII. Granted, this Ethernet port is only used for management, and is not part of the switching fabric itself, but it does prove that Ancor has some expertise with Ethernet. I'd like to see that expertise extended a bit to provide connectivity to legacy networks. (Like mine. <g>) Craig