<<The points about SAN and NAS being complementary are valid, imo>>
Hey, that was my response! And I don't like not receiving proper attribution! ggg
The software point I was making is just as applicable to NTAP as it is to EMC, with one possible exception: time-in-market. That's a new whiz-bang investing term I just trademarked, BTW. EMC has been selling TimeFinder, SRDF, ControlCenter, etc. for a long time. Many, many people have been trained on it. Many of those people have moved into positions that have buying power. Those people will be very reluctant to re-train their storage management people. They will be equally reluctant to change policies and procedures that have stood the test of time. Already, we are seeing a move toward (or a retreat to?) mainframe storage management philosophies that were abandoned during the last 10 years in the rush to build out all of the rest of the world. The good thing about EMC is that they know these philosophies cold, and build products that embrace and enhance them.
Now, none of this should be taken as a position against NTAP. As I noted in my original post (and was not carried over here), I am invested in both companies equally. NTAP has an excellent product, with a proven track record, and great software to go with it, too. Their software pretty much defines the Gorilla Game grail of an open, proprietary standard. I still have some technical misgivings about their scalability, simply because of the limitations of Ethernet. But everyone else seems to think that Ethernet will continue to be suitable for this type of file access, and I'm not going to argue with the folks who are paying for it and installing it on a daily basis.
FWIW, NTAP has qualified a QLogic FC interface for their products. I would presume that it is used for back-end access to the drives that hold the file system. From that start to hooking up big-britches EMC Symms for truly large-scale data storage is a small step. I doubt that it would happen, because neither one of the companies wants to do it. But, I would be far less surprised to see EMC make it work with a NAS filer of their own design, and be hugely successful with it. I would be greatly surprised to see NTAP suddenly gain the experience and ability to deal with terabytes on the scale that EMC does.
Regardless, these are both great companies. I love them both, from a technical and an investing perspective. It's definitely going to be fun to watch the battle play out.
buck |
