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

To: KJ. Moy who wrote (20922)	2/28/1999 11:20:00 AM
From: George Dawson	Respond to of 29386

"Many companies have huge budget to purchase more processing and storage power for 1999. They would be hard press to purchase old technology. They can't afford to wait a couple years either for a final SAN standard so that they can plug devices of any vendor they wish into any SAN." KJ, These are good points. One other point I have noticed about the cost factor might be the impact that PCs have at the corporate level. To come extent you can see companies that spend several million dollars in a fiscal year upgrading and maintaining their network of PCs. Many of these companies still have corporate mainframes and they have had to custom engineer software to make the PCs on their LAN back compatible with their mainframe. To me this shows clearly that total compatibility is not a strict priority - since companies continuously redesign components (especially software) around these interop problems anyway. Many of these redesigns are at a significant performance cost. So for big companies at least they may find: 1. A SAN budget might be less than their existing PC budget or at least push their PC upgrade cycle out further. 2. SANs seem to address not only data storage and warehousing needs but also to fill in the gap that many corporations that find in their IT services - how do we continue to upgrade our mainframe-NT-PC hardware, connectivity, and data? In fact, I would think that the companies who want to address these needs should be marketing SAN technology as a way to plug the gap. If you go to EMC, CMNT, and GSN/Inrange they offer these products. 3. The whole issue of "back compatibility" seems illogical to me given the hardware and data structures in many corporations. This was an alleged hypothetical advantage in the NGIO press release. Corporation networks already have PCs connected to a lot of gear that wasn't designed to be hooked up to PCs. It doesn't matter if it is a fibre channel switch or the new NGIO bus. The only overriding factor in all of this is maintaining access to your data and being able to easily study this data. George D.