-----Original Message-----
From:   Lee Gunter [SMTP:[log in to unmask]]
Sent:   Thursday, March 19, 1998 8:53 AM
To:     [log in to unmask]
Subject:        Re: EMC Symmetrix drives

I would certainly like to see more discussion over time on this whole topic
of new HP 3000 disk technology -- particularly because we made the jump to
EMC in late 1996 with very dramatic performance turnarounds for much of our
batch processing.  I've been contacted by SSA vendors since HP World '97,
and I am very interested in what they have to offer, but I probably would
not (and I told them this) be willing to purchase just yet for two reasons:

     1)   HP has *not* indicated a willingness to support this on the HP
3000, nor have they performed many (if any) efficacy studies
          to determine the appropriateness of the technology for the
platform.  I don't dispute any of the performance numbers stated
          in this thread or by the vendor reps with whom I've spoken;
however, I want to see HP's vetting (thanks, Bill  :-) of the technology
          before I consider it for our production environment.  HP has a
well-defined relationship with EMC, on the other hand, and that helped
          to cement our decision.
[Charles H. Finley]  
I went to a storage presentation at HP about a month ago.  This was my impression of their position on high speed access to storage.

According to HP Several vendors have voiced support for SSA; however, very few have delivered products or solutions. Connor withdrew support for SSA after being acquired by Seagate (which is firmly committed to FC-AL).There are further signals that IBM may be or will be abandoning SSA and migrating to a new extension called Fibre Channel-Enhanced Loop(FC-EL) that will provide all or most of SSA functionality over Fibre Channel. For customers considering SSA, this raises an issue of investmentprotection. The Fibre Channel Loop Community (FCLC) is rapidly growing with many products currently shipping including adapters, drives,cabinetry and components.   In short, the people at the meeting said that HP doesn't think that SSA has much of a future.

Several vendors (EMC, Seagate, Quantum, Symbios Logic, Emulex, HP, Sun and others) are shipping FC-based products including disks, adapters and RAID arrays which further demonstrate that FC is ready for production. FC seems to be the standard and we all know how in love HP is with the standards

Much of the competitive positioning IBM is using against FC is several years old based on prototype products and is not relevant to productsshipping today. For customers requiring multi-platform and multi-vendor support, a quick look at SSA should result in either a Parallel SCSI, UltraSCSI, or Fiber Channel decision. Customers who plan to implement an exclusive IBM shop may find IBM SSA attractive. However, beware of IBM shifting from SSA to FC-EL. 

Whether IBM abandons SSA or not, HP made it really clear that they have no plans to support SSA.  Bottom line, expect no HP support and probably no investment protection with SSA.  

(BTW, some of my facts came from HP and some from MTI.)