Thanks, Eric. Go ahead. I will not venture over to that thread at this time.
I believe that EMC has a wonderful product in Symmetrix and it fills the needs of the raised floor, channel attached storage niche, which is a huge one.
However, their attempts, thus far with NAS have been half-hearted. Their NAS/Symmetrix front end product was an obvious attempt to preserve their Symmetrix architecture with little investment and little risk. Their new NAS product was put together from existing software and hardware platforms that are well-understood; offer no real advantages compared to NTAP; and are being marketed (through channels) such that their sales force continues to concentrate on their Symmetrix product line and customers.
This is a classic set of responses from a company being threatened by a disruptive innovation. For example, IBM did this with their UNIX product line and sold tons of the stuff to its huge installed base, but the product is pretty much an "also ran" in the general market, where it competes with SUNW and HWP.
In the meantime, NTAP has met Symmetrix scalability challenges and eclipses EMC price/performance metrics. In fact, now NTAP has the scalable NAS solution and EMC is stuck with a mid-range solution that does not scale well.
Their new NAS product has no innovations in its file system or its RAID methods. Thus innovations in backup and clustering are not forthcoming.
Also, NTAP has changed the nature of its market niche by adding support for IBM S/390 DB2, adding software for end-to-end content management, including streaming content, and built its value chain with new virus control and more streaming media relationships. Their publication of benchmark data with multi-filer configurations prove their scalability and price/performance advantages.
Note that NTAP recently was selected by ORCL for its internal storage needs, been selected by Airbus, and a few others. These are significant signals in their timing in the middle of all this EMC hoopla. The folks at ORCL understand both products (EMC and NTAP) very well. They have been using both for a while. They did an in-depth, source code level analysis of NTAP a few years ago when considering formal support of NTAP filers as NFS mounts of database tables. NTAP is still the only NFS mount supported by ORCL, or Informix, or Sybase, because of the strength of the NTAP software/hardware architecture.
One must wonder what happened to the NAS solution that EMC originally said jusitified its purchase of DGN. Remember that Dan W said at the time of that purchase that he knew of no new NAS technology coming from DGN. Looks like his information was good.
I must say that my respect for EMC's management has declined since the DGN and Tucci decisions. JT has had very little experience leading a sales force in a fast-growing, highly competitive, rapidly changing marketplace. I think that Tom Mendoza (NTAP) understands how to motivate the sales force emotionally and financially and is doing a great job.
I am not trying to bash EMC here. I just find the contrasts between the two companies to be glaringly in favor of NTAP in the long run.
And I did not even mention new developments at NTAP that will come to fruition next year, like DAFS/VI and, perhaps, a low-end filer to deliver content to the very edge of the content management network. |
