Stitch,
Re: Fibre Channel
From the latest EMC quarterly report...
...Revenue from Symmetrix Enterprise Storage systems with Fibre Channel connectivity exceeded $170 million for the second quarter. "We have now shipped about $500 million in Symmetrix Enterprise Storage systems with Fibre Channel connectivity in less than a year," Ruettgers noted. "While others have described the market for Fibre Channel as developing slowly, we have found the opposite to be true. The increased distance and speed enabled by linking servers and storage systems using Fibre Channel are helping EMC customers - particularly in the Windows NT environment - to deploy EMC Enterprise Storage Networks, which combine the benefits of distributed computing and consolidated information. We believe this trend will accelerate overall demand for Windows NT in mission-critical applications...."
SEG is supplying EMC with these fibre channel disk drives. Previously, IBM had gone with their own proprietary SSA and there was a big powwow between IBM and SEG to merge FC-AL and SSA to prevent a standards war, but it went up in smoke and everybody except IBM decided to go with fibre channel. IBM is playing catch up here as is everybody else. My understanding is that EMC's success with fibre channel is partly responsible for SEG's minor resurgence in the enterprise segment because SEG continues to supply EMC with most of its drives although EMC has started to use IBM and Fujitsu drives in some of its boxes. SEG, IBM, and Fujitsu (with Hitachi as a dark horse) look like the top tier vendors in this space for the next few years. QNTM and WDC are strictly second tier. Maxtor has completely disassembled the components of their PC strategy (Axil, Symbios)so I think it's out of the running here too. I do not think a disk drive operation can survive this current downturn if it relies only on the desktop. The fact that none of the three have any significant head and platter operations is no coincidence either.
There are two concepts in enterprise storage that are still in the alpha-beta testing stages --(NAS (network attached storage) and SAN (storage area networks)-- which can only work with fibre channel connectivity.
Re: Shugart and Egan
I am also a little concerned about Al's personal relationship with Dick Egan at EMC. I hope that recent regains at EMC by Seagate are not threatened by the change in watch post.
So aside from the fact that both Egan and Shugart anticipated the current trend towards "smarter" storage devices (SEG Software - $320 million; EMC Software - $400 million), what do a New England yankee like Egan and a flamboyant California native like Shugart have in common?
Regards,
Gus
P.S. Amazing thing about EMC: 90% of its customer base expect to double storage capacity in the next year. EMC has a demonstrable 6-12 month field-proven advantage over the competition, including IBM (whose Seascape architecture is indeed catching on), which is why it can charge premiums that range from 100-200% when they bid for contracts. |
