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

To: Alan Aronoff who wrote (15967)	4/29/1998 1:23:00 PM
From: George Dawson	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 29386

Alan, Ancor's switch is definitely cascadable. I have the actual diagrams of how that can happen and will be happy to e-mail them to you. I also have a number of references that I will check tonight that all state switching from the same backplane (if the backplane has large enough throughput) is preferable to cascading. With cascading there is an addition of the latency in each switch involved. I have even looked at clustering technology that cascades some switches and confirmed that latency increases in these arrangements. I think it is interesting that the Silkworm and MKII have the same backplane, but Ancor currently is the only one with a large single stage switch. The comment that Brocade is the only company that can produce a switched fabric is not accurate. From the MKII specs sheet: Multi-chassis fabric hops 24 to 96 fabric ports with 1 or 2 hops 96 to 3072 fabric ports with 1 or 3 hops I believe this is a cascaded arrangement, but there may be semantics involved. For example, Ancor does not refer to the switch as cascadable despite the chassis hops listed on the spec sheet. The diagrams of setting up large fabrics show considerable interweaving of ports. Maybe the difference is a separate backplane to backplane link on the Silkworm? George D.