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

To: Lhn5 who wrote (14615)	2/22/1998 10:45:00 AM
From: George Dawson	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 29386

"Would a low feature 8 port fiber channel switch be intended to place Fibre Channel at the desktop? Is there any reason to have it there?" Larry, I think it depends on a number of variables. The cost of FC products is continuing to drop significantly and there is a significant mismatch between the switch speed and other components in the system -the switch essentially can't be saturated in most current LANs/SANs. This has lead to an interesting trade-off with both IBM and Amoco choosing the older generation 1/4 speed switch. Although nobody seems to know the exact number of switches or configurations in these settings, I would make the argument that both of these applications probably needed more ports than speed. After all even if you use the older generation 1/4 speed switch configured for the maximum number of ports you are still moving a maximum of 16MB/s on the same backplane. If you think about how campus LANs typically evolve, there is probably a lot of fragmentation of what is stored and a switch with more rather than less ports is better. This seems true, whether you are trying to back up storage or stream data out to a large number of PCs. It would be an interesting exercise to run the numbers (if anybody actually know them) comparing the hypothetical 8 port switch at $1K/port to the older Ancor gear - looking at the other variables like maximum connectivity. All of the data I see on how much information is transferred on a typical LAN during a typical day has it in the tens of MB rather than GB range. I think 8 ports switches may have a place in small well-defined LANs/SANs. The other issue is the features of the low cost switch. Ancor set a precedent by offering more features at a lower cost. If there is a hidden cost, like needing additonal modules to get the functionality you want the cost advantage may be limited. George D.