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Technology Stocks : Network Appliance

NTAP 115.66

-2.9%

Dec 12 9:30 AM EST

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To: Miguel Octavio who wrote ()	3/30/2000 1:27:00 PM
From: pirate_200	Read Replies (2) of 10934

EMC vrs. NTAP from the customer perspective. All in all, this is a great post about what an actual customers sees when evaluating EMC's Celerra and a NetApp filer: See: messages.yahoo.com EMC vs. NTAP by: panglossdr (42/M/Austin, TX) 3/30/00 11:38 am Msg: 13171 of 13205 After reading through the various postings I thought it might be nice to add some empirical data to the discussion. I work for a very large financial institution. We have done an in depth study on Celerra vs. the NetApp filer. Following are some opinions(my own) based on the testing. 1. EMC is between 3 and 5 times the cost of NetApp per megabyte of storage even with our substantial discount. 2. The Celerra architecture is predicated entirely on having a Symmetrix as a back end. This drives the initial cost of implementation well over 7 figures even with only a couple hundred gigabytes of disk. See above. 3. The EMC devices are legacy type frames which require a data center environment to support. The NetApp filer can fit easily into a standard cabinet and requires no structural changes .... i.e. reinforcing the floor. The Celerra also requires a control workstation. 4. The NetApp filer is self contained, built on "off the shelf technology", and journals changes in a battery backed NVRAM. This enables it to withstand a power interruption and come back up uncorrupted. Since the Celerra is really two seperate devices it requires a built in UPS to avoid corruption due to loss of power. 5. NetApp uses a technology neutral file system and therefore has complete control over modifications. EMC uses a UNIX filesystem developed by a third party that it has modified to run in Celerra. 6. Upgrading the Celerra to a higher capacity usually involves upgrading the Symmetrix back end which requires EMC to be on site. Upgrading the Filer means either simply adding disks or adding another filer. Both of these activities are easily done by an end user. 7. A performance comparison done late last year between Celerra and the filer (single CPU), revealed the that the Celerra required 4 times the cache memory (Celerra and Symmetrix back end combined) and 8 times the number of filesystems to match the throughput of the filer. The filer response times given a similar throughput were twice a fast as the Celerra. In other words EMC had to configure a great deal of hardware and software to match the performance of an out of the box NetApp and even with that the response time still lagged. What this all adds up to is that EMC can not compete with NetApp on a price/performance or a price/gigabyte comparison. Bottom line is that most organizations such as ourselves need to implement solutions which are cost effective, easily maintained, and easily enhanced. NetApp was the clear winner in all of these categories. I'm not sure how this translates into stock price but I can tell you that the filer is generating a considerable amount of interest inside of my company. From my perspective, EMC can not possibly reduce the cost of Celerra and still make money. Therefore they will either have to reinvent the wheel and leave their current customers with a dead end solution or continue to throw hardware into it and increase the cost to the customer. Neither of these sounds like a winning situation. I hope this gives everyone good perspective on the technology .... if not the prospects. Disclaimer: The opinions expressed here are my own and do not reflect those of my employer.

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