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Technology Stocks : Wind River going up, up, up!
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To: lkj who wrote (8555)11/25/2000 9:24:06 PM
From: Bill Fischofer  Read Replies (2) of 10309
 
Re: IxWorks and Storage

I wouldn't count on I2O being a terribly big source of revenue for WIND. Unfortunately I2O seems a day late and a dollar short because just as it is starting to roll out the entire market for server-attached-storage is collapsing. At the enterprise level storage is rapidly becoming a network service and the strategic attachment interface that is emerging is gigabit ethernet (although fibre channel will remain very important for some years to come).

To understand what is happening with storage one need only look at what happened with networking and timeshift things by a decade. In the 1980s networks were considered part of a computer's I/O subsystem and proprietary networking schemes like IBM's SNA and Digital's DECNet dominated the landscape. Then along came companies like CSCO and the rise of a processor-independent network called the Internet which started to take over all of the old processor-centric networking schemes. Few today doubt that eventually the Internet will subsume all other networks.

Similarly, in the 1990s storage was considered a "peripheral" to the computer. But like networking before it, companies like EMC and NTAP saw things differently. Storage began to evolve away from the processor into a separate external service. We're still in the early stages of this evolution, but by 2005 the idea of processors "owning" and "operating" storage will seem as antique as the idea of them "owning" and "operating" networks does today.

The ultimate effect of this transition is that we are moving from a processor-centric IT worldview to a storage-centric one. Formerly the processor reigned at the center of the enterprise and storage was literally a "peripheral". Under the new paradigm these roles are reversed and the storage network moves to the center while processors become the new peripheral to the storage network. This theme has been elaborated extensively on the EMC thread and those interested in exploring it further can continue discussion on this topic there. It's main impact on WIND will be that I2O will likely be irrelevant to WIND's future revenue and earnings potential.
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