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

To: KJ. Moy who wrote (19079)	11/1/1998 5:47:00 PM
From: Craig Stevenson	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 29386

KJ, I'm glad to hear that we don't disagree on this. It's pretty rare when we do. <g> I did miss your point about Gadzoox probably being Gadzoox in the 3COM announcement. It will indeed be interesting to see what the announcement actually says, and how they posture. No, I don't expect big FC sales out of 3COM right away, or from any of the other big networkers. What I do expect is for the big networkers to legitimize the Storage Area Network, just like they did with Ethernet, Fast Ethernet, and now Gigabit Ethernet. Just the fact that one of them has now acknowledged that SANs exist is a big step. <g> One area where I do think we disagree is what a company like 3COMs goal is. I think their entry into the SAN space has less to do with them wanting to carry storage data across the WAN or LAN, and a LOT MORE to do with tapping an entirely new revenue stream. That new source of revenue is what used to belong exclusively to the adapter and drive people. Think about it. Early implementations of SANs won't be as transparent as you and I envision them to be eventually. So, in essence the networkers are going to try to take a chunk of the network that exists between servers and storage. Right now, that's SCSI, ESCON, or SSA. Those are markets that the big networkers don't really play in at all. In SCSI, which I am most familiar with, there are only two players required in a typical server/storage combination. The most common combination that I see is Adaptec and Seagate. The SAN opens this up to where you still need a Fibre Channel adapter and a Fibre Channel hard drive, but now you need some connectivity between them to scale. (Using either a hub or a switch.) That has to be why Roy Sardina started Brocade and G2. He (correctly) saw that this missing piece to the puzzle had to be supplied by someone. Craig