The Fall of Fibre Channel: Page 6 of 16

Come the Revolution

Unless you’ve been living in a cave, Gollum-style, for the last few months,
you’ll know that the technology that’s emerged to challenge Brocade’s Fibre
Channel dominance is IP/Ethernet storage networking.

This isn’t a fat pipe dream. Scale Eight Inc., for example, is already making a
nice nut by offering file software to companies, including both Microsoft Corp. (Nasdaq: MSFT)
and Viacom Inc. (NYSE: VIA), that want to set up rich media services over long-distance IP
nets. It’s signed three new customers in the last three weeks – and claims
its revenues in its last quarter increased 80 percent over the preceding one (see Scale Eight Set to Close $30M).

Things are happening on the hardware side as well. Cisco, Nishan Systems Inc., Pirus Networks, SAN Valley Systems Inc., 3ware Inc., and others are working on IP storage switches (see Nishan Swaps Out Sales Team). Quantum|ATL Products Inc.

recently demo’d iSCSI running on its tape drives. Meanwhile, disk drive
manufacturers like EMC Corp. (NYSE: EMC) and Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) plan to start building iSCSI (SCSI over IP) interfaces into
their equipment once the spec has been implemented in silicon – not
software. That day isn’t far off. QLogic Corp. (Nasdaq: QLGC) says it will ship all-ASIC iSCSI
implementations in the first half of 2002. In the meantime, Adaptec Inc. (Nasdaq: ADPT) and Alacritech Inc., amongst
others, are now shipping pre-standard SCSI adapters that use a hybrid
ASIC/CPU design to provide decent performance, while allowing the
flexibility to upgrade the final standard when it’s ratified (see Show Time for iSCSI).

Of course, simple availability of products won’t create a market on its own.
What’s needed is that all-important business case. And that’s exactly why I
believe IP/Ethernet technology will be successful in its challenge, though
not for a while.