Here's a similar view that shows the growth of Intel-
based servers at the expense of Unix. The high-end
server market is still dominated by Unix.
The dominant Unix player is, of course, JDN's Sun
which sold just about 100,000 servers during its
latest blockbuster quarter, including 500 of its
$1+ million top of the line E1000s.
news.cnet.com
Intel vs Sun
In February, Intel drastically cut its support
of Sun's effort to bring Solaris to Itanium,
saying that Sun wasn't sufficiently committing
resources or time to the project. Then the
squabble escalated: Sun reaffirmed its plan to
bring Solaris to Itanium, while Intel broadly
hinted that Sun had become its primary competitor,
and target, in the server market.
Now things have changed. In an interview
yesterday, Sun chief financial officer Mike Lehman
said that running Solaris on Itanium, which was
delayed again this week, is not an important part
of Sun's future.
news.cnet.com
Intel processor-based server market
1999 2003
Back-end (> $100,000) 6% 33%
HI - midrange ($50,000 - $99,999) 14% 65%
LO - midrange ($25,000 - $49,999) 27% 75%
low front-end (< $25,000) 25% 96%
Source: IDC/Chase H&Q
JDN, note the looming squeeze on the Unix market and
the opportunity for an independent storage vendor
like EMC. Here's the 1998 EMC vision of storage
networking that is starting to show up in the
numbers now:
In the future, software will automate all of that.
If Rothnie has his way you'll be able to wheel an
EMC box in, plug it into the SAN (what EMC calls
the Enterprise Storage Network) and turn it on.
The rest will happen automatically. Same with
servers, attach the front end to the LAN for
connection to clients and the back end to the SAN.
Presto.
nwfusion.com
Here's anecdotal evidence of EMC's productivity
argument that, of course, depends, on the unique
profile of each customer's computing environment.
..........So far, Stott says the EMC system has
exceeded expectations. "If you look at what
operations people do in server management, the
vast majority of their time is spent in storage
management. And what the EMC SAN does is create
one 4-terabyte disk that you can allocate
on-the-fly to any server. It's much less labor-
intensive in managing disk space than the Compaq-
based solutions that we were using previously,"
he says.
EMC also offered flexibility and scalability.
"Normally, with a Compaq, HP or Sun storage array,
you're limited in the total capacity that you can
put on each system. With EMC, however, we can tie
in any number of systems for any number of
projects across the board whether [Windows] NT or
Unix, and virtually one administrator can
administer every single system from a storage
perspective," Stott says.
nwfusion.com |
