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

To: George Dawson who wrote (21810)	5/15/1999 7:34:00 PM
From: Pigboy	Read Replies (7) \| Respond to of 29386

thanks all for some decent posts recently, i ventured over to Vegas a few days ago to check out that nutty Networld-InterOp thing. i didn't hear that ibm rumor but i made the rounds to see how the MKII's look. started at the "SANaganza" FC booth and talked with people from HP, ATTO, Brocade, JNI and Veritas there. didn't really find out any NEW information (ie. oems). the biggest feeling I got out of the day there was the drastic difference there was in regards to the how Ancor's competitors talked about them. From personal experience a few years ago (ie. Gignet conference, BARS conference), everyone kind of talked about Ancor like they were 'out there' or seemed to be following the wrong strategy. This is COMPLETELY different now to me from hearing people talk. Now, there is, at least to me, a lot of respect rather than sweeping negative comments. Ancor is in the 'loop.' They had the Mkiis showing in a lot of places and i got the feeling they HAD to be one of the leaders. Almost brought a tear to my eyes. ;-) I saw the Mcdata switch too and its HUGE. JNI was showing it with Ancor and Gadzoox stuff and the guys there didn't have a clue what the difference was except saying that the Ancor switch was the 'low cost' one. I got the feeling it was their director switch. The guys there seemed like 'booth' guys, not the tech specialists by any means, but one guy said the Ancor switch was just like plug and play and booted right up no problem. guys at the brocade booth constantly stressed working with, "Compaq, Storage Tech and Dell" over and over again and even stressed working with "open" as opposed to "proprietary". I tried to find out when they were going IPO and they didn't know for sure. I anticipate, like everyone else probably, in about 2 weeks. The HP guy said he wasn't sure about an oem with Ancor, but seemed to be another one of those booth guys (ie. doesn't know the goings on with contracts of companies). I didn't talk with the Consan guy who had an Ancor switch too, unfortunately. I didn't see the Ancor switch in the ATTO booth but the guy there talked very positively about them and FC in general. Said FC is happening now and he was excited about his end of it. Also ventured to the gadzoox booth, which had their low end switches. I got the feeling from asking questions all day that Ancor and Brocade are still at the two players at the high end (ie. name server, powerful fabrics) and that there is very little difference between the two of them really. it doesn't hurt that I believe ancor is a little ahead technically and cost wise, but of course, i am biased. ;-) i went to the SanCastle 'start-up' booth and they had an outrageous babe handing out things. took me awhile to gain my focus. i wasn't impressed with them at all, but perhaps it was just the fellow i talked to who stressed Class 1 on their switch to me (i've given up on Class 1 being a big money maker for a little while from past experiences here ;-). I think these guys are like the old Arcxel in some way, setting up tent and wanting to get picked off (don't all start-ups). i wonder what experience they have in management or engineering. A Gadzoox fellow was over there when i was, introducing himself. The best feeling I got was talking to a person at the Hitachi booth, which was in the other giant auditorium as the Sanaganza booths. Just an Ancor MKII stood in there and the guy said positive things about working with Ancor and they are very committed together. made it sound like Ancor was exclusive with them, but he didn't say that specifically. Someone mentioned to me that ~25% of the traffic on the LAN is for storage and storage is doubling every 18 months. Not sure if this is even remotely true, but the point is that storage is growing extremely fast and it will have to be managed and taken off the LAN in some respects. I asked about NAS, and I got a lot of different responses. Many will do Network Attached Storage with Ethernet and with many different companies, etc...but ultimately, no matter how big NAS gets or if it finally gets together more with common standards some day, it still won't do anything to stop the growth of the SAN world going forward. And its still FC on the disk interconnects, not GE. Well, SAN booths were all over the place. I DOUBT this was true last year. This is not going to slow down. overall a good show, i think. and perhaps the visibility of the SAN world with the obvious presence of Ancor as a 'player' has helped the stock a little in the last week. all of this in my humble opinion, pigboy