The ENDL Letter Happenings are the industry source for strategic guidance and insight into the past, present and future of storage standards and interfaces.

With years of experience in storage interfaces and standards the ENDL Letter staff can tie loose ends together in a timeless coherent picture more meticulously than anybody else. Two significant examples of in-depth ENDL analysis are:

• The complete recap of Contingent Allegiance, Auto Contingent Allegiance, and AutoSense history and definitions which even today confuse every first-time SCSI engineer; and
• The detailed dissection of the Fibre Channel Addressing foibles and fumbles which are to blame for many of the Inter-Fabric Routing headaches plaguing T11 today.

During its heyday, the ongoing month in and month out process of storage interfaces standards development was the bread and butter of ENDL Letter reporting, but you cannot think of the Happenings as just another set of committee minutes. Minutes are far too dull for enjoyable reading, but not so the ENDL Letter. Each monthly Happenings was a page turner, ripped from the script of a soap opera titled The Days of our Standards.

Ideas come from and individuals and it is their personalities which affect the direction of committees and architectures. Ultimately, the standards themselves are a reflection of these people. The ENDL Letter chronicled their activities: who they were, who they worked for?

In the world of open standards, it is essential to know which companies led, which followed, and where alliances made sense. You acquire knowledge on these and other matters from the pages of the ENDL Letter.

When the well laid plans for 4 Gbs Fibre Channel were knocked off kilter, the ENDL Letter was there from the first dustup for all the festivities. ENDL Letter coverage of a "friendly exchange of opinions" is much more than a running volley of 'he said - he said'. The ENDL Letter leaves no stone unturned in covering the whole story as in the Happenings coverage of the last gasp for Parallel SCSI and the announcement of the new contender, all in one meeting week.

The ENDL Letter brought readers all this every month, with pages that were anything but sleep inducing. The content was lively, the goal was to give readers the impression of having been present. There was page after page of easy to follow technical, marketing, and economic information which could not be found in press releases or trade publications.

It is easy to be misled into thinking that the volume of standards development traffic which can be scanned as information. Take the case of the iSCSI (internet SCSI) reflector. Too much data can be overwhelming instead of illuminating. One needs the ENDL Letter to serve as an invaluable filter sorting the wheat from the chaff. A case in point is the iSCSI efforts to come to grips with SCSI mode pages, the ENDL Letter condensed thousands of lines of e-mail traffic down to a few insightful paragraphs.