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To: Gus who wrote (3931)	12/3/1998 12:13:00 PM
From: George Dawson	Respond to of 17679

Gus, It is my understanding that the concern with tape drives is with the class of service and the protocols used. As far as I know FC-AL interfaces all use class 3 service where delivery of frames is not guaranteed and data integrity needs to be checked by the respective upper level protocol. This may be OK for video, but for data it is less robust. I think the goal for integrators is to make sure no data is lost and that there are easy upgrade paths. The impression I get from being an FC investor, reading the literature, talking to engineers, and attending shareholder meetings is that at least when it comes to FC the basic approaches would be: 1. Use a higher class of service (class 1 or 2) for tape drives. 2. Use multistaging of switches to guarantee uninterrupted data flow to the tape drive. I think it is possible to use all classes of service with tape drives, but was told it was more difficult to do with class 3 from an FC engineer. I am guessing that the setups you described by the broadcasters were point to point connections using an FC interface, rather than attached to a fabric as a target device. George D.