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Technology Stocks : Son of SAN - Storage Networking Technologies -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Edwin S. Lee who wrote (373)	2/23/1998 11:00:00 PM
From: Joe Wagner	Respond to of 4808

Thanks Edwin for the motivational post. I agree with your comments and feel that Fibre Channel has tremendous potential. Once it gets moving it will grow into a powerful force in the networking universe. Joe

To: Edwin S. Lee who wrote (373)	3/22/1998 9:48:00 AM
From: J Fieb	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 4808

This post by Mr. Edwin S. Lee was so thought provoking that I have found myself pondering over it, and rereading many times. Thanks again for getting us thinking- FC is potentially profound. To help me understand it I asked someone in the business of networking to make some comments from his point of view. There are probably many more people like me that struggle to understand the technology so I thought I'd post his response. This is what was said...the message has been excerpted to make it shorter and is meant to further understanding,keep us thinking, and not to start any arguments Someone on the AOL board took the time to say.... Before I respond I just want to re-state a point I have made before about SAN. All the Web traffic needs eventually to sit on a server in a hard disk. Intranets/Extranets are growing at phenomenal rates and real business applications are running on them. At my company we recently did all our benefits enrollments on a Web application. Storage systems are getting too big to sit inside servers. Hence the business need to network storage systems to the servers will come. There will be no other way to accommodate the storage needs. This is not crystal ball stuff but is happening today. The SAN market will not be small so I mean nothing negative when I state my humble opinion that SAN is a good market for FC. There is no competing technology except SCSI which has run out of steam. If FC wants to go into the LAN they must 1) compete with technologies that have not run out of steam and 2) support and itnteroperate the established technologies. On to the embedded posting. This is the vision of technologist which I am not. I am a business and marketing guy but history teaches us a lot about technology: Betamax was better technology than VHS. WordPerfect was better technology than MS Word 1,2,3,4. The Mac was better than WinTel. RISC was better technology than CISC. Token Ring was technically superior to Ethernet. The history of high tech is littered with dead companies and dead technologies. Most these technologies were technically superior to the ones that won in the market place. Finally I think your friend is praising the specification and the technical vision behind it. In my industry a bunch of technologists defined the perfect data communications technology while Sun Microsystems rolled out hundreds of workstations with TCP/IP running for free and Cisco systems built boxes called routers that enabled computers around the world manufacturered by different vendors to exchange data using IP. A lot of other vendors had superior technology but IP was good enough. Today we see IP penetrating the world of AT&T and Sprint who have preached the technical dogma of Broadband ISDN and ATM two a beautiful technologies that are expensive, complex, and difficult to manage. TCP/IP is today the dominant technology for the transport of data over networks not because it was better but because it was good enough and established. Today we are talking about running voice over IP and going head to head with the phone systems. I spent two hours today in a meeting discussing the price points we wanted to hit for technology we would bring to market in the year 2000. The key to the right price is simplicity and leveraging what customers already are using. Why was God able to make the world is six days and rest on the seventh. He did not have to deal with an installed base.............. Will FC move fast enough to live up to its potential? " The key to the right price is simplicity and leveraging what customers already are using".This point is very good. Perhaps, once FC is well established in the SAN using it in addition for LAN or WAN will be eloquent. Any chance that FC will come to the rescue for the I/O bottleneck for CPU's- memory access problems? Is this where the smaller trace-width comes in? If anyone has a link on this subject please post. Thanks in advance for anyone else who puts their thoughts out on the board.