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Strategies & Market Trends : Gorilla and King Portfolio Candidates
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To: Doren who wrote (25076)5/20/2000 7:41:00 AM
From: DownSouth  Read Replies (1) of 54805
 
Doren, you are getting there fast. Hang in there.

NTAP's architecture, network attached storage, attaches the filer appliance to the LAN so that application servers can access the data on the filer. The filer is a very specialized machine that does one thing--serve data--very fast, protect that data, and maintain a very high level of reliability. Its purpose is not to amass the enterprise's data into a single manageable area (like EMC's SAN architecture), but to:
1) decrease the effort required to manage storage;
2) increase the rate at which data can be accessed;
3) offload the overhead of serving data off of the application servers;
4) share data between many heterogenous (UNIX/Windows/HTTP) application servers;
5) minimize the effort required to expand storage capacity, and
6) distribute the data on filers throughout the enterprise (if desired) while
7) allowing centralized and distributed adminisration of the filers.

Very important point: The difference between EMC and NTAP is not SAN. The difference is their vision of storage management. EMC's vision is to centralize an enterprise's data storage and to manage that Enterprise Storage Network (EMC's term) more easily. NTAP's vision is to allow the enterprise to place the storage appliances where ever they wish, including on the "edge" of the enterprise, but still minimizing the total cost of managing that data and maximizing the end user's level of access (speed adn availability) to that data.

This is a replay of the class mainframe versus distributed computing philosophies. The mainframers first fought with minicomputers and then with PCs and PC networks. The battle continues between "Enterprise Storage Networks" (ESN) and Network attached Storage.

Very soon we will see NAS include SAN technology (w/fibre channel switches), so the distinction between NAS and SAN becomes meaningless. The distinction between NAS and ESN becomes the battleground.

Also, don't forget that 8% of NTAP's business is for web caching software and appliances. That's a whole other subject.

Follow this nice thread of a conversation between me and Bill on the NTAP thread:

Message 13722492

Message 13725904

In fact, catch the last 100 or so posts on that thread for several nice discussions.
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