Preaching Togetherness McData wraps up its switch to Fibre Channel By Loring Wirbel, EE Times Broomfield, Colo. -- As it enters its 15th year of business, McData Corp. is completing its transition from a manufacturer of cluster controllers and channel gateways for IBM mainframes to a specialist in Fibre Channel switching. The EMC Corp. subsidiary is defining a niche as a manufacturer of enterprise-level fault-tolerant Fibre Channel switches. McData is preaching more collaboration than competition with those closest to its architectural concepts. It is launching interoperability tests with Brocade Communications Systems Inc. (Santa Clara, Calif.), Jaycor Networks Inc. (San Diego, Calif.) and Essential Communications Inc. (Albuquerque, N.M.), with demonstration testbeds slated to be shown at the upcoming NetWorld+Interop in Atlanta. And McData's ES-4000 enterprise switch, which debuts this month, makes use of technology adopted on an OEM basis from Brocade. "Fibre Channel switching is still a small enough niche that we are more interested in validating the market than in direct competition," said McData president Jack McDonnell. When the American National Standards Institute finished the Fibre Channel standard nearly five years ago, proponents touted three topologies possible with the gigabit technology: point-to-point links, switching fabrics and arbitrated loops. But arbitrated loops proved so popular in mass-storage and server-cluster applications that a special industry group--the Fibre Channel Loop Community--sprang up around them, and chip vendors optimized products for them. Switches and serial links were all but forgotten. The trend shifted in early 1996, as Hewlett-Packard Co. introduced a quarter-speed (266-Mbit/second) work group switch from its Canadian Networks Operation (CNO) and as newcomer Brocade demonstrated new switching architectures. McData developers realized the technology employed in the mainframe world for Escon--the semi-open fiber-optic channel standard originally defined by IBM--could easily be shifted to Fibre Channel. The full redundancy and failover features expected for data-center applications could be translated from the Escon to the Fibre Channel worlds, the developers reasoned. Fibre Channel specialists had yet to focus on fault-tolerant system implementations. McData was not hurting for business when EMC came courting in late 1995. IBM had signed an exclusive OEM deal with McData for manufacture of the Escon Director switch, and the agreement remained healthy even after IBM arch rival EMC acquired McData. Counting the IBM OEM business, McData has a 90 percent market share of Escon products. There were also legacy cluster and channel-processor orders, though McData had sold all interests in future SNA-to-TCP/IP products to Compuware early in 1995. McData contributed more than $200 million to EMC's $2 billion-plus net revenue in fiscal 1996, and the subsidiary employs more than 200 at its Colorado headquarters. The current McData product mix, heavily weighted to the OEM version of the IBM Escon Director, should shift to reflect a healthy Fibre Channel product percentage by mid- to late 1998, McDonnell predicted. After the company's acquisition by EMC in November 1995, McDonnell developed a plan for moving the bulk of business to Fibre Channel. With EMC's blessing, McData acquired HP's Canadian Networks Operation in the spring, immediately gaining access to a small work group switch. That 16-port switch has been integrated into the McData product line, becoming the DS-1000. McData retains some 15 CNO employees in North York, Ont. (near Toronto), and hopes to add five or six more ASIC engineers to accelerate work on work group Fibre Channel switches. The CNO technology was not used for larger systems. McData had been developing an architecture in which a large matrix switch controlled three Fibre Channel switches, one of which served as a standby that would fill in if one of the two primary switches failed. To speed time-to-market, the company used Brocade modules as the three direct switches, adding its own matrix-switch controller on top. The resulting product, the ES-4000, is being shipped to early beta sites this month and will be shown at NetWorld+Interop in October. McData is moving to establish an international presence for the DS-1600 and ES-4000; it has signed with Data Media Products Inc. to distribute the products in Japan. (Next article) (c) 1997 CMP Media, Inc [This article comes from EE Times in a joint cooperative effort with the Motley Fool. For more articles like it, please look at Fool's Gold every weekend or simply go to the Fool's Gold Mine and page through our back issues, which all have clever and cool EE Times articles in them.]

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