1) NTAP has a disruptive technology to EMC's which means NTAP has the potential to overtake EMC's king throne. Although they are serving different storage segments. Am I right?
As NTAP's product evolves "upmarket" and as EMC's product evolves "downmarket", their respective storage segments will overlap very significantly. NTAP's disruptive technology does have the potential to overtake EMC's throne. Of course, one could argue, EMC's sheer size has the potential to overtake NTAP's throne.
This overlapping will occur very shortly (within 12 months) as EMC enhances its mid-tier NAS offering and NTAP announces new clustered systems.
2)What would it take for NTAP's products to replace EMC's products, or it's never going to happen.
I don't expect NTAP to make serious inroads into EMC's installed base anytime soon. What I do expect is as NTAP evolves its clustered configurations into the 6-12TB size and the Virtual Interface (VI) products are brought to market, NTAP will continue its 75% win rate over EMC even as NTAP goes after the same 6-12TB business.
NTAP's scaled up new products are targetted at the mid-range of EMC's current target market.
3)Do you think NTAP's products would be able to match with EMC's products in terms of shear speed provided they have the same configuration (e.g. CPU). I understand EMC's products are based on Fiber channel.
NTAP's products are also based on FC for management of the storage subsystems. The network (FDDI, Ethernet, etc.) is the interface to the NAS subsystem, currently.
As VI evolves and GBe-net evolve, the perception that the network is a bottleneck will diminish.
NTAP filers are already faster than EMC configurations when configured on a dollar for dollar or capacity matched basis.
The differentiation between EMC and NTAP based on SAN architecture will soon disappear. NTAP will be a choice of SAN, network, or other new technologies (VI, SCSI over IP, etc.).
4) Who has the better marketing team?
NTAP has the more motivated, better managed team. EMC has the bigger team. |
