Sam loves it.
I would guess that part of their [VRTS's] earnings surprise of the future will include their lower share count. And I'm sure they will make certain that there revenue numbers are very robust for the quarter or two after the dance ends [presuming that it ends the way we think it will--it surely ain't over till it's over].
Meanwhile, DSS and Dell are doing a little Snap dance of their own. Can you believe that Dell wants to make enterprise storage a commodity? Say it ain't so, Michael! My bolding:
Dell Pushes Its Commodity Strategy With New Machines
(08/30/00, 2:36 p.m. ET) By Martin J. Garvey, InformationWeek
Dell on Sept. 5 will unveil two storage products designed to make storage administration easier.
The move fits with the company's overall strategy to commoditize the entire computing market.
Dell Computer Corp.'s PowerVault 530F will be a storage-network appliance based on a Dell (stock: DELL) server. It will sit between servers and storage computers on a Fibre Channel network. The 530F will hold some of the intelligence for the data that sits on Dell's PowerVault storage systems. The machine will control remote mirroring, snapshot copies of data, and three-way mirroring for activities like backup, data mining, and application testing. It will be priced at around $50,000.
The second computer will be one Dell resells for Quantum Corp. (stock: HDD): an entry-level network-attached storage server to be called the PowerVault 705N. Milpitas, Calif.-based Quantum's Snap Server 4100 takes in 120 Gbytes of file information in 15 minutes and supports multiple levels of RAID for data protection. And being only about an inch high, a lot of them can fit in a standard rack. It will be priced at around $3,000.
Most storage systems have intelligence buried in controllers that can cost hundreds of thousands and even millions of dollars. Dell, Round Rock, Texas, is taking an appliance approach while trying to make enterprise storage a commodity. |
