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

To: Mark J. Hardie who wrote (17767)	8/18/1998 2:28:00 PM
From: George Dawson	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 29386

Mark, I can't get the article either, but I think this is why Craig has been advocating for a high performance FC to GE/Ethernet switch, similar to the GE switch designs you will find on various web sites. It makes sense on 3 counts: 1. You avoid the use of NICs since on the LAN end people will still have ethernet cards. 2. It is unlikely that people will need 1 GBs to the desktop in the near future. 3. As Roy has already pointed out the latencies and I/O of current FC adapters are optimized for SCSI and would have unacceptable high latencies for LANs, especially where you have a high traffic of small messages. In fact, there is a good example in Hennessy and Patterson's text comparing the performance of sending messages of various sizes over either ethernet or an ATM 155 Mbit/sec network. They show that message sending performance was only 1.2x as fast even though the network speed was 15x faster with ATM. The reason was overhead due to UNIX network layers and inefficient drivers. If Ancor (and 4 other FC companies) are working on a high performance GE to FC router, it will allow the use of FC backbones with ethernet/fast ethernet/GE LANs. George D.

To: Mark J. Hardie who wrote (17767)	8/18/1998 8:43:00 PM
From: Craig Stevenson	Respond to of 29386

Mark, There is no such thing as a boring network magazine. <g> <<Is this (pick one) one/a/the reason why Ancor is having so much trouble selling product...lack of NIC's (or the perception of lack of NIC's)?>> NIC performance in the LAN is certainly hampering Fibre Channel's ability to compete with Gigabit Ethernet, but I don't think Fibre Channel NIC availability is as much of a problem as it used to be. Several companies are on their second or third generation of Fibre Channel NICs, and performance is steadily improving. Widespread adoption of the PCI bus in servers and workstations helps the availability problem too. (I still want to see 64-bit PCI and I2O support, but that is on the horizon too.) At this point, I don't see Ancor as being severely limited by the availability of Fibre Channel NICs. I think that companies that are building Fibre Channel SAN components will offer Fibre Channel connectivity through proprietary interfaces, or through third parties. The biggest problem for Ancor is that there aren't enough big Fibre Channel SANs out there that require Fibre Channel switches. (Although that will change.) As Technocrat suggested, when the wave hits, look out. (I'm convinced that it is a matter of when, not if.) Craig