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To: Edwin S. Lee who wrote (361)	2/20/1998 2:14:00 PM
From: Neil S	Respond to of 4808

FCA Update: Fibre Channel Association Names 1998 Board of Directors MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Feb. 20, 1998--The Fibre Channel Association (FCA) today announced election results for its 1998 Board of Directors. The association is comprised of over 60 member companies dedicated to promoting Fibre Channel solutions. "Last year was a landmark year for Fibre Channel as technology development and deployment flourished due to increasing demands for high-speed interconnect solutions. Given the converging of member company activities, this trend will continue strong and 1998 will be the year of implementation," stated Brenda Christensen, FCA chairperson. "This trend is embodied in the makeup of the Board." "EDS is committed to working with the FCA in moving the Fibre Channel industry forward," stated Dennis Talluto, EDS technology manager and new Board member. Talluto added, "EDS believes the Fibre Channel opportunity in the marketplace is very strong and that the industry has accomplished a great deal in the last year. We are especially encouraged by the number of storage suppliers and computer manufacturers with Fibre Channel support in their products." Following is the list of re-elected and newly FCA Board members and officers: Re-Elected Directors and Officers Charles Bazaar, Jaycor Networks, Inc., San Diego, Calif., Secretary/Treasurer Brenda Christensen, Brocade Communications Systems, Inc. of Santa Clara, Calif., Chair Michael Fitzpatrick, Fujitsu Computer Products of America, Oklahoma City, Okla. Marty Francis, Symbios Inc., Wichita, Kan. Michael Hoard, Boeing Defense and Space, St. Louis, Mo. Newly Elected Directors Dale Head, Amdahl Corporation, Sunnyvale, Calif. Carla Kennedy, Ancor Communications Inc., Minnetonka, Minn. Tom Lassen, EMC Corporation, Hopkinton, Mass. Linda Reed, McDATA Corporation, Broomfield, Colo. Dennis Talluto, Electronic Data Systems (EDS) Corp., Auburn Hills, Mich. Bob Weisickle, Hewlett-Packard Company, Roseville, Calif. The new Board elected Jerry Leitherer, GENROCO Inc., Slinger, Wis., vice president and chair of the FCA Membership Committee. Fibre Channel The creation and use of shared information is a corporation's most important asset. Improving the speed at which information flows between departments and divisions is essential in today's business environment. Fibre Channel is an ANSI-standard, gigabit connectivity technology designed to provide high-performance, high-bandwidth access to mission-critical information. The Fibre Channel Association The Fibre Channel Association (FCA), a 60-plus member organization with affiliates in Europe and Japan, was formed to develop a community of manufacturers, systems integrators and systems vendors to educate the business world about Fibre Channel technology and to ensure that companies can implement end-to-end Fibre Channel solutions. FCA SWIGs (Special Working Interest Groups) focus on specific aspects of the technology that target vertical/horizontal markets, including storage, video and military/aerospace. For information on Fibre Channel or to become an FCA member, contact the Fibre Channel Association at 650/949-6730 or via email at fca@fibrechannel.com, or visit the new FCA Web site at fibrechannel.com. --30--eb/sf* lmm/ac CONTACT: Truax Consulting Susan Truax, 310/640-0550

To: Edwin S. Lee who wrote (361)	2/20/1998 2:27:00 PM
From: Neil S	Respond to of 4808

INTERVIEW-Seagate Software escapes cuts, eyes Asia By Josephine Ng SINGAPORE, Feb 20 (Reuters) - Seagate Software, a unit of Seagate Technology Inc <SEG.N>, has escaped the cutbacks undertaken by its disk drive maker parent and is eyeing troubled Asia for growth opportunities, a senior official said on Friday. "We're growing and hiring people. The restructuring has no effect whatsoever on Seagate Software," company president Terry Cunningham told Reuters in an interview. Seagate Software offers products for information management and network and storage management. The software unit operated independently and based on its performance in its last fiscal quarter, the company was looking to an annual revenue of about US$280-290 million for the year ending June 1998, Cunningham said. For the quarter ended January 2, 1998, the 1,500-employee company chalked up sales of US$72 million while Seagate Technology had sales of $1.6 billion, he said. In the previous financial year, Seagate Software had revenues of about $217 million. Seagate Software had acquired small and medium sized companies in the United States and was now looking to build up its Asian presence through them, he said. "Those companies haven't even started looking into Asia Pacific. Because of that, less than 10 percent of our revenues come from the Asia Pacific region," Cunningham said. Seagate Software was aiming for around 15 percent of sales from the region and for sales from outside the U.S. to reach 50-55 percent, he said. Michel Montandon, vice president of international operations told Reuters markets outside the United States contributed about 32 percent of the company's global sales. Montandon said the Asia Pacific region could bring in 15 percent sales contribution in the next one to two years. On the economic crunch in Asia, Cunningham said: "We look at the current crisis as a temporary problem. We see it as an opportunity as alot of our competitors pull back," he said. Seagate Software would continue to focus on Hong Kong, Singapore, Australia and Japan, he said. It was eyeing big markets like India and China but would reassess plans for South Korea. The company was looking at shipping localised products to China and setting up an office in Beijing in the next six to nine months, he said. Cunningham said he was not concerned about competitors selling in markets like China first. It was more critical to build support and a presence there to service the market before plunging in to sell, he said. He told reporters later that Seagate Software was riding on the growing penetration of the Windows NT platform. Increasing need for decision making tools and ways to lower cost of technology ownership were trends in its favour. He said Seagate Software was working with other vendors on a new development in storage and networks. Vendors like Microsoft <MSFT.O>, Compaq <CPQ.N>, Hewlett Packard <HWP.N> and Seagate were working on using fibre channels to link storage sub-systems in a network. Two disk drives will be able to communicate and exchange data between each other beneath the operating system and hence not bog down the network. "That's a really interesting one to keep an eye on over the next year or so," he said. He said one of the key elements of Compaq's acquisition of Digital Equipment Corp <DEC.N> (DEC) was having access to DEC's storage technology. Seagate Software would bring out products for this new type of storage networks within six months, he said. 01:29 02-20-98

To: Edwin S. Lee who wrote (361)	2/20/1998 3:11:00 PM
From: Neil S	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 4808

Edwin, yes welcome. Your name sounds familiar to me, are you by any chance involved with Ed Frymoyer of EMF Associates ? Thanks for you comments regarding FC hubs. You mentioned that " in two years the cost differential between switches and hubs will be such that performance tradeoffs of FC-AL loops may not be worth it." That sounds like it might be bad news for the hub guys. Do you think that is why both Gadzoox and Vixel are talking about introducing more "switch like" products ? [ ex Gadzoox Denali switch]. Thanks very much. Neil

To: Edwin S. Lee who wrote (361)	2/20/1998 5:53:00 PM
From: Douglas Nordgren	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 4808

Edwin, as a member of T11 (FC) standards process, would you be able to shed some light on future classes of service? There was a brief discussion of Class 4 multiplexing and Quality of Service benefits recently on the Ancor thread, but there has been talk of a Class 6 spec. Do you know what Class 6 entails, and what problem(s) it is meant to address/solve? Also, do you know of any companies currently planning to rollout Class 4 in the future? I hope you don't mind some friendly brain-picking. TIA. Douglas

To: Edwin S. Lee who wrote (361)	12/19/1998 3:32:00 PM
From: J Fieb	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 4808

It's been some months now since your Feb. post on FC. This is a portion of that post........ I ran across Fibre Channel, somewhat by accident, in 1996. Its enormous potential was immediately clear to me: I think its comparable to that of the microprocessor. I'm trying to contribute to having FC reach that potential, without having to start another company. FC still has big hurdles to jump... the technology is the easy part, the primary issues are related to business decisions, strategic financial commitments, and a focus on solving customers' needs. I was hoping you would write to thread regarding what has happened for FC since then. Any comments on how big SANs will be? Can FC move beyond SANs onto new ground? I have been following the potential role in digital video TV studios. One Q I have has to do with potential for embedded FC technology in the home. 1. C-Cube-MPEG2 digtial video encoding is falling to Moore's law. Their DVx chip is a Codec that they optimally see......."Another key technology enabler for the new services is real-time MPEG-2 encoding. Christie Cadwell, director of consumer-recordable products at C-Cube Microsystems (Milpitas, Calif.), noted that digital video enables previously unimaginable features. An instantaneous time-shifting function is "the killer feature" that will capture people's interest in 1999 to 2000, "but in 2004 and 2005, being able to pause, rewind or see snippets of live TV broadcast will become an expected feature for every new TV," Cadwell predicted. 2. SONY-Pushing development of the drive industry for video use.... Early digital VHS successors ReplayTV, and TiVo look like this today.. techweb.com TiVo Introduces Fast-Forward TV (12/19/98, 12:47 p.m. ET) By John Gartner, TechWeb Silicon Valley start-up TiVo has begun field trials of a new personalized TV service that it says will revolutionize TV viewing in the same way the Internet changed information delivery. On Monday, TiVo will debut its service in Los Altos, Calif., as well as a partnership with disk-drive maker Quantum to provide custom hardware for the receiver boxes. TiVo is also licensing its technology to cable TV operators and consumer-electronics companies to merge the service into next-generation appliances. Quantum will make high-speed hard drives optimized for delivering multiple streams of audio and video between the TiVo receiver and the television. TiVo has designed custom processor chips to process and manage the streaming MPEG-2 data, so users can pause, fast forward, rewind, and replay any television broadcast. TiVo's TView hardware platform includes real-time MPEG encoder chips and proprietary database and storage systems. It's now being offered to television, DVD, VCR and set-top manufacturers for integration with their products. Merging TiVo and these devices makes for "perfect convergence products," said Gary Arlen, president of Arlen Communications. DirecTV and local cable operators are participating in the Los Altos field trials. TiVo expects to announce agreements with an additional 12 partners in the coming months. The TiVo service tracks user viewing and stores up to 20 hours of programs that can be viewed any time. The receiver box will sell for about $500; the monthly fee for the service will start at less than $10. "Five hundred dollars won't be an impediment to the first wave of adopters who will pay almost anything to get the service," said Arlen, who expects prices to drop sharply before a national rollout. The ability to pause live TV and replay it in slow motion justifies the $10 monthly fee, which otherwise would have been spent on TV Guide, Arlen added. The TiVo service is partially modeled after the Internet's always-available content and search and browse features, said Stacy Jolna, vice president of programming at TiVo. Jolna came to TiVo from Microsoft's WebTV. With 99 percent penetration of TVs in U.S. homes, he thinks letting users search television programming is a greater opportunity than TV-based Web browsing. "This has the potential to be bigger than the Internet," Jolna said. Josh Bernoff, principal analyst for TV research at Forrester Research, said people will pay to have greater control over programming. "The battle will be fought over ease of use, not advances in technology," said Bernoff. TiVo is applying smart-agent technology used to track usage patterns on the Web. Jolna said the agent technology automatically matches a user's likes and dislikes against the available broadcast content to recommend programming. Users can also search based on genre, or the name of an actor or a show. Jolna said user-viewing data is kept private, as the information is stored locally and sent back to TiVo servers in aggregate. Users can opt to provide demographic information, which TiVo hopes will let it eventually replace standard advertising with ads targeted to a particular viewer. TiVo has an ASIC that........ The Tivo receiver also incorporates an ASIC designed to do "patent-pending media switch," said James Barton, chief technology officer and vice president of R&D at the company. The ASIC has nine DMA engines that run continuously to manage simultaneous flows of video and data. The clock rate is a TV-friendly 27 MHz. When I read media switch, HDD, video, etc it sounded like a miniature FC network. What are the chances for an FC role in any of this stuff? Just day dreaming. Thanks in advance for any help.