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Technology Stocks : Son of SAN - Storage Networking Technologies -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: GJS who wrote (1148)	4/2/1999 8:52:00 AM
From: J Fieb	Respond to of 4808

Thanks, "This could push available I/O per fabric over 20,000 MB/sec (20GB per second). Today a PCI bus can do around 120MB/sec." Until your post I had no idea that the PCI bus was not only a bottleneck, but almost completely choking off the vital flow of bits..... a subtotal occlusion, in medicine those kind of pipes get bypass surgery. This statement also sounded very good.... he ability to do clustered systems in a 10KM geographically dispersed SAN is an absolute advantage for Fibre Channel. Another advantage is that this capability available for use today. Any other technology is still on the drawing boards. This statement is reminiscent of our own SI FC expert George D.- "FC is now!" While looking for significant news, and not finding any, here are some small things. Digital video and FC. I'n not in the digital video biz and I have looked for FC signs in both AVID and TEk AVID may be too busy with it's softimage acquisition to make use of the latest technology as this post suggests.... Message 8434415 Several other competitors, new and old, have announced edit packages based on newer technology prior to expected NAB announcements. This may have had a chilling effect on those who believe such things matter much.... I think these other co. use more FC than AVID? AVID will have to get caught up sooner or later...... TEK- Grass Valley acquisition hasn't worked out well for TEK and this art. suggests that they won't be a part of TEK that much longer. eetimes.com They would like to move out of the video business, which is only 15 percent of their total revenue," said Ted Kundtz, an analyst at Lehman Brothers (New York). "That's been the thorn in their side and is causing most of their earnings shortfall — a loss of $10 million in the last quarter. "The shift to digital broadcast technology has been a lot slower than hoped for, and Grass Valley has other problems [as well], like too many products. "It won't be easy to sell," Kundtz added, "but Tektronix has been aggressively streamlining the operation and will take action fairly soon." Relational Investors (San Diego) has acquired nearly 10 percent of Tek's shares. A Tektronix spokesman said that the company does not take issue with Relational's assessment of its business and that it "wants to bring back the stock's value." That, said Kundtz, would be "in the mid-30s to 40 range, assuming a return to growth in the measurements business, which has been weak." Indeed, the measurements market is returning, albeit gradually. Even so, will Tek take HP's cue and split further, into a test-and-measurement company and a printer/storage company? "I don't know if they are large enough to generate two stand-alone companies, although it makes some sense because there's not a lot of synergy between those two businesses," Kundtz said. "However, they are surely looking at that possibility because the two entities clearly are worth more than the present stock valuation." So TEK has been hurting while waiteing for Digital Video to finally arrive-sounds very similar to the FC story. This unit should be a better fit with any one of a half dozen companies that come to mind. I wonder if Philips/SGI would consider it? GJS's post says that 2G FC will the here soon. That will be plenty of time for HDTV. Anxious to see the first major use of FC with HD video, but if they need 1.5GB we need the next spec! On the FCA site they have some new stuff up. They will meet with ISPs at their big meeting.... fibrechannel.com Targeted Conferences Note: All locations and dates are proposals that are tentative pending planning by the team of sponsors for each conference. Vertical Market Date Location Related Event Internet Service Providers (ISPs) Week of 10/25 San Jose ISPCon Video Editing & Post-processing 3 Q 99 Los Angeles None Oil & Gas Exploration Week of 11/1 Houston SEG Medical Imaging Week of 11/29 Chicago RSNA Conference Guidelines Approximately 10 FCA member company sponsors (1 attendee from each) Approximately 10 - 20 end user attendees (identified and invited by sponsors) FCA attendees to include 3 board members and to include system, interconnect, and storage company representatives Program tentatively to include: State of Fibre Channel Industry Presentation (FCA member) Fibre Channel Technology Roadmap Presentation (FCA member) Fibre Channel Solutions Presentation (FCA member) FCA Strategy and Role Presentation (FCA member) One or more End User Presentations Interactive Discussion on User Views and Requirements Written report to be published by FCA for its members That's it FCA; Get those ISPs tuned into FC. Make FC an internet solution and give FC some of the .com magical valuations.

To: GJS who wrote (1148)	4/2/1999 10:38:00 AM
From: KJ. Moy	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 4808

GJS, <<By the time NGIO or any other solution is production ready in volume, FC will have a huge installed infrastructure that will be hard for another medium to displace. >> IMO NGIO will emphasize on opening up the aggregate throughput from the processor(s) to the peripherals(i.e. a serial architecture which can handle 1Gbytes/sec or more). It will use a link layer based on Fibre channel. Supposedly by 2001, the standard is finalized, companies are signing on, products are being made, NGIO switches are being made. Besides FC will have a huge installed base by that time, what kind of shape and form a NGIO switch would have will be of great interest to many of us like J Fieb for obvious reasons. FC switch can be a natural fit to support also NGIO. However, I do see the advantage of having a pure NGIO only switch if all devices on the fabric only speak NGIO. So far, both factions of NGIO and FIO do not have any storage vendors(i.e. no peripherals manufacturers) as members. Does that mean NGIO is a no brainer for them to implement or they can continue to use FC and only the server companies need to implement this new I/O structure? I'm not sure. It is unclear to me. Do you have any insight on this? But the current emphasis seems to be on re-defining the server I/O shortcomings. KJ

To: GJS who wrote (1148)	4/2/1999 3:40:00 PM
From: Douglas Nordgren	Respond to of 4808

GJS, Thanks for your views on NGIO and Fibre Channel, industry insider opinions are hard to come by and are appreciated. I don't know if you are allowed, but can you update us or comment on this December article on Sequent's planned Fibre Channel improvements, particularly the highlighted passage? I'm a bit unclear on the concept of how software can minimize port connections in a fabric. If you can provide even the most general principles without divulging proprietary methodologies, your overview would be appreciated. Douglas zdnet.com Separately, Sequent(Nasdaq:SQNT) will announce plans to improve switched-fabric Fibre Channel support for SANs (storage area networks). The Beaverton, Ore., company will introduce hardware and software with "zoning" capabilities for heterogeneous environments. The software partitions devices into separate zones, helping to eliminate the risk of one system taking resources from another system, officials said. This will be helpful while the industry figures out a way for different operating systems to share data safely. Other new software from Sequent enables a company to link as many as 20 switches in a fabric without decreasing bandwidth scalability. It accomplishes this by minimizing the number of ports needed to connect switches to storage devices. In the past, several ports were required to connect storage systems to the switches, and there weren't enough ports left over for speedy communications between the switches, officials said. The products will work with a new version of Sequent's Dynix operating system, which is due to ship in mid-1999. Sequent also plans to support NT in the first half of next year.[1999] The Sequent software will be embedded on switches from Brocade Communications Systems Inc., which Sequent resells.