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

To: Douglas Nordgren who wrote (395)	2/26/1998 4:20:00 PM
From: Douglas Nordgren	Respond to of 4808

ITEM: ComputerWorld 2/23 - FC based storage networking: Rollouts link storage standards Nancy Dillon Bob Johnson is confident that Fibre Channel-based storage networking will be the next storage standard. What he isn't so sure of is the fate of his legacy SCSI-based servers and disk arrays as he migrates to Fibre Channel over the next two years. "I have a big investment in SCSI right now, so an entirely new storage interface makes me a little nervous," said Johnson, an engineer at real estate firm Cushman & Wakefield, Inc. From his Seattle office, Johnson supports 200 Western region employees for the New York-based company and helps set national standards for 2,000 users across the country. Analysts said many users believe they need homogeneous Fibre Channel environments to build storage networks resembling today's LANs. "But users don't have to give up SCSI to get into storage-area networking now," said Michael Peterson, an analyst at Strategic Research Corp. in Santa Barbara, Calif. "If I were building a completely new storage network today, it would be wise to go Fibre Channel all the way. But there are several new products that help SCSI users get around forklift upgrades," he said. One of these products is the CrossPoint 4400 Fibre Channel-to-SCSI router from Austin, Texas-based Crossroads Systems, Inc. Another is the Jigsaw 8 SCSI switch from Gigalabs, Inc. in Sunnyvale, Calif. The CrossPoint 4400 router lets users transmit data from distributed SCSI-based systems over Fibre Channel lines. It has two Fibre Channel ports and can connect with four SCSI buses. Because the router can take advantage of Fibre Channel connection lengths up to 10 kilometers, users don't have to house their storage peripherals in the same room or building as their servers. The Jigsaw 8 SCSI switch also lets users expand the 25-meter limitation of SCSI. For example, users can form a chain of switches to regenerate the signal that transmits data between two offices. They also can connect two switches with a fiber line to achieve distances up to 20 kilometers. It has eight slots and is compatible with interfaces including SCSI, Asynchronous Transfer Mode and the High Performance Parallel Interface. Gigabit Ethernet and Fibre Channel interfaces will follow. PLANNING FOR THE WORST Johnson said he could see the advantage of storage networking with current SCSI systems. "In the Western campuses I deal with, if there is a disaster such as a fire or earthquake, all of my SCSI storage is in one place, and I'm stuck. So it might be useful to use a switch or router for replicating data outside of areas with high rent and high probability for disaster," he said. Lu Huang, a senior technical manager at the UCLA Medical Center in Los Angeles is using a Fibre Channel-only switch to connect a Unix server to three disk subsystems containing X-ray images. Aside from higher throughput of Fibre Channel, "the ability to situate storage far from the server has proved the most important advantage of storage networking," Huang said. The CrossPoint 4400 has a suggested price of $24,995, and the Jigsaw 8 is priced at $8,000 per port. www2.computerworld.com