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To: KJ. Moy who wrote (16148)	5/9/1998 12:42:00 PM
From: George Dawson	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 29386

KJ, "We should expect continued development and use of proprietary 'clustering' technology for the forseeable future. It would not, however, IMHO, have the same capability like FC from all the ones I've seen." Pfister's spin on this: "Now you would have to be deaf not to hear about clusters. All God's children got a cluster product, or two, or three, or four and are talking about them - if that's the phrase with all the power of their collective lungs. The products are mostly (not always) fairly crude, but, hey, you have to start somewhere. At least they recognize the name...." I think it will be an uphill battle for FC. You are right of course about the geographic distance of what is being clustered and the FC advantage. The special interests of the clustering companies also needs to be carefully considered - especially when you start to get consortia backing a certain proprietary technology. I would be more comfortable if FC was at the same speeds and latencies of some of these technologies. I of course hope you are right and FC takes over everything from clustering to replacing the Blockbusters down the street. George D. Reference: Pfister GF. In Search of Clusters - The Ongoing Battle in Lowly Parallel Computing. Prentice-Hall, Upper Saddle River, New Jersey, 1998.

To: KJ. Moy who wrote (16148)	5/9/1998 7:09:00 PM
From: Craig Stevenson	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 29386

KJ, Our apparent disagreement has more to do with our respective experience in the networking field than with any technical issues. From your standpoint, I agree with you. I'm still baffled why there is any competition for Fibre Channel in the enterprise, since FC makes so much sense. But when I see ClusterNet, VIA, HIPPI, ServerNet, and the other existing proprietary schemes continuing to maintain or increase market share, there has to be a reason. (Fibre Channel SHOULD win this battle hands down. I think it is simply a matter of time.) My perspective is from the low-end of the Fibre Channel market. I see the huge installed base of Novell, Unix, and NT networks wanting to move to Fibre Channel storage, in large part due to the large loops of storage devices that can be created. Granted, this is not the best solution for scalability, but it is relatively inexpensive in the short run, and the number of devices on each loop can be reduced as performance demands. From this perspective, something with the marketing clout of an Intel/Microsoft/Compaq combination (VIA) has to be taken seriously as a possible competitor to Fibre Channel. Craig