Gadzoox's "willingness to be experimental with gigabit Ethernet has put them in a strong position," says Hurley.
The company has said that it expects the OEM adoption of Slingshot, it's new 2-Gbit/s Fibre Channel switch, to drive revenue in the third and fourth quarters of fiscal 2002 by 40 to 70 percent, quarter over quarter.
Cisco may have noticed another feather in Gadzoox's cap. Gadzoox has played a major part in the development of the FCIP (Fibre Channel over IP) standard, expected to be approved by the standards bodies in September. Gadzoox wrote this protocol with help from
Lucent Technologies Inc. (NYSE: LU).
It enables the encapsulation of Fibre Channel within IP packets to transport storage traffic over long distances. FCIP could thus play a significant part in the overall IP storage market that Cisco wants to dominate.
To get in on this action Cisco bought Nuspeed Internet Systems for $450 million last year for its iSCSI (Internet over SCSI) device and expertise in this protocol, which also
transports storage traffic over wide-area networks. According to the analysts however, iSCSI can't match FCIP in some areas. "It doesn't provide the performance factors of native Fibre Channel that FCIP will," says Hurley.
"It seems Cisco is hedging its bets on the standards front. Rather than taking its usual 'IP will rule' approach, it can see Fibre Channel is where the money is right now," says Hurley. On whether Cisco might actually put its hand in its pocket and buy Gadzoox he is less convinced. "Gadzoox is a diminishing stock in the Fibre Channel galaxy, so Cisco would be buying them cheap, but I'd be surprised."
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