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

To: George Dawson who wrote (1284)	5/30/1999 6:23:00 PM
From: Pigboy	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 4808

Craig, Thanks for the presentation. It was easy to understand and presented some interesting points. The presenter started with the concept that people think it is a NAS vs. SAN world, when it's really not. They look similar, but they are not in competition on a lot of levels. Some of his thoughts on NAS and SAN. My comments in parenthesis-- -- No one is talking about running SANs to desktops (TCP/IP) and managing two enterprises wide networks infrastructures. SANs are for the machine room. -- Disk Devices don't speak TCP/IP and won't anytime soon. (Basically, I believe he is saying that NAS is important for users on the network and the files and data they share, while SANs are important for the specific tape/disk infrastructure) -- Said there will be competition of NAS vs. SAN when it comes down to the middle ground, where the issue is "talking with applications (servers)". Will one use TCP/IP (NAS) or Fibre Channel (SAN) here. (This was confusing to me regarding the whole TCP/IP issue, considering as George just pointed out, FC can throw around IP) -- Concluded by saying that Network Appliance will use both NAS and SAN, because both are needed and growing. The focus should be on how both can work together also. -- They have an OEM agreement with Brocade for Fibre Channel switches (i believe they used to be ONLY a NAS company, so this shows a branching out of strategy, obviously). -- He mentioned several times that things on a network were electronic and getting twice as fast every year (ie. Servers were getting twice as powerful every year), EXCEPT the disk drives. Disk drives are getting twice as big and have only gotten twice as fast in the last ~8 years. Said that to "Balance" servers, one thus had to double the amount of disks, i believe. -- Questioned whether one should have a file server with 1000 disks, then went on to say they had no other solutions at the moment and didn't want to fight where things were going, so were happy right now with Fibre Channel, because its a wonderful technology to have 1000 drives talk to each other. If one Does add another 1000 drives, then one just adds another FC switch and so on... -- Mentioned that the killer app for SANs was for sharing tapes/backup. mentioned STK was doing this and tape jukeboxes were a trend. -- Also said that FC switching had features like remote disks and mirroring. Also, could handle "WAN tunneling". (what the hoot is this and would this require the infamous WAN FC bridge nobody has seen?) -- Ended by saying that NAS + SAN offers the complete solution from desktop to data center to storage devices. Seemed to clear up some ideas for me, but i have more questions now. ;-) thoughts anyone?, pigboy