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

To: George Dawson who wrote (16747)	6/21/1998 8:20:00 AM
From: Craig Stevenson	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 29386

George and All, Some information and thoughts: The June 1998 issue of InfoStor magazine (which I received yesterday) has an interesting quote in an article titled, "Storage-Area Networks: Present and Future", which appears on Page 33. "Finally, Fibre Channel has a switched topology that allows thousands of ports to be connected to a fabric. Traffic between ports is routed through switches that can be interconnected and cascaded." Notice the use of the term "cascaded". Brocade uses that term, while Ancor uses the term "multi-staged". The previous quote is from Clodoaldo Barrera, director of strategic storage systems at IBM's storage systems division in San Jose. This would seem to add some independent corroboration of ar/wilhu/bullstroke/whoever and Roy Sardina's statements that IBM will announce some sort of deal with Brocade in the near future. Although not conclusive, my research a week ago into the FC switch management issue (requiring a Java 1.1 compatible browser) would also support this view. It may well be true that there are a number of divisions at IBM that will require this technology, and that they might not all go the same direction, but I still think this was a major loss. As Roy has stated earlier, there aren't that many top-tier OEM candidates out there. Ancor can probably scrape by without one of the big ones, but it doesn't seem likely that they can be a huge success without an IBM, HP, Sun, or Sequent in their camp. I have also done some research into bullstroke's latest comment on the Yahoo board: "I have just been told someone is out of the running at two MAJOR system vendors and it's up to a company in silicon valley and one in fruit county to fight it out ..... These two system Vendors are HUGE!!!!!!" The reference to Silicon Valley would appear to be Brocade, based in San Jose. The fruit county reference threw me for a while until I visited the orangecounty.com web site. One of the cities listed is Irvine, which happens to be the home of Arcxel, now part of Vixel, based in Bothell, WA. Assuming that the above statement is true, and that I am correct in my analysis, from a purely technological standpoint, having Arcxel still in the running and Ancor out is not good. Ancor's switch should be light-years ahead of Arcxel's, although the differences between the MKII and Brocade's SilkWorm are much less. Once again, if Ancor is not able to win OEMs based solely on the technical merit of their switch, there must be other factors at work that we are not aware of. Pricing, geography, moon phases? I have also done some additional research, this time concentrating on geographical proximity. The last major OEM opportunity at this time would appear to be HP. Unfortunately, according to their web site at hp.com they are based in Palo Alto, which is close to San Jose. Another concern is that HP could be considered a system vendor. I think the bottom line is that Ancor faces an uphill battle until they can sign an OEM or two. Brocade has now ensured themselves of a continuing revenue stream that will fund research and development and an increasing sales effort. Ancor can't wait too long... Craig