Do you see all the potential competition from respectable players threatening their dominance?
Not yet. EMC has a 2 year lead on the rest of the field. IBM is generally acknowledged to be closest to EMC in terms of technology. Here's an article that showcases the major shortcomings of IBM's Shark. Furthermore, EMC Software should easily exceed $1 billion in sales this year (from $822 million last year) and should widen EMC's lead against stiffer competition from everybody.
IBM Upgrades Shark
(03/28/00, 8:15 p.m. ET) By Mike Koller , InternetWeek
IBM on Tuesday said it will invest $400 million in consulting and testing facilities to deliver storage area network (SAN) technology.
However the announcement failed to offer any specifics as to when IBM (stock: IBM) will offer customers of its Enterprise Storage Server, code-named Shark, missing features. Among those features quietly omitted last fall from ESS were Peer-To-Peer Remote Copy, which allows for continuous copying of server data in remote locations and FlashCopy, which takes a snapshot of live files for disaster recovery or data mining.
As reported last week, IBM said it would disclose plans to release those features by this week. The company released ESS in September, but those features were delayed. An IBM spokesman would only say the missing features should be available by this fall.
IBM did announce a new version of ESS that will come with a 64-bit RISC processor, 16GB of cache and additional PCI buses, which the company said will improve performance. IBM did not disclose pricing, though the systems are available immediately.
The company said current users of the ESS can upgrade to the new processors, and its enhanced software will support the missing features as well as native Fibre Channel connectivity "as those features become available." IBM would not offer further details.
Analysts said IBM is still hedging on when these features will ship. "It sounds as though what they are doing here is trying to take the spotlight off their failure to deliver the important stuff," by announcing its $400 million investment in centers and consultants to develop SAN technology, said Meta Group analyst Rob Schafer. "But the key is that everybody is waiting for the functionality."
IBM is misleading its customers, added Pete Duplessie, analyst at Enterprise Storage Group. In addition, no matter when the ESS features are delivered, IBM still faces obstacles in taking on market leader EMC, because of integration issues between customer applications and ESS. In order to take advantage of the functions of ESS, disk vendors will have to work with application vendors to integrate software with ESS, Duplessie said.
"This is not an example of the third-party software guys champing at the bit to do the integration work, this is IBM saying, 'Please do the integration work,' " he said.
Duplessie said that even though IBM currently does not have a big enough customer base with ESS to trigger demands for integration, it will happen eventually anyway because IBM is still a key provider of storage systems. IBM said it has delivered 1,500 ESS systems to date.
Through the $400 million initiative announced today, IBM is marshaling a large sales force to promote its products and services, and adding global and regional testing facilities. More than 1,000 sales specialists will be added to its storage solutions sales force, and IBM Global Services will offer SAN and Storage Services consulting.
On the hardware side, IBM announced new enhanced Fibre Channel-based routers, gateways, switches, and managed hubs to improve enterprise level SAN connectivity. And it debuted a SAN solution using a cluster of two Netfinity servers with Fibre Channel connections and mirroring extension software from Legato that can be separated up to 6.2 miles.
Next week, Tivoli will announce Tivoli LAN-free management software to enable sharing of data among different application programs, servers and storage environments to allow users to access files more quickly on local area networks, IBM said. |
