Eric, I think you misread the cards here. The fact is that NTAP has good presence in the F500, though not the base that EMC does. NTAP is selling into the big cap technology companies and into the smaller caps.
I am not sure what I am misreading then. I meant to convey that EMC has a much greater presence in the large cap Fortune 500 type company than NTAP. I believe that is an accurate statement. I did not say NTAP doesn't sell to big cap technology companies; I did note the big ORCL win recently announced.
In my previous post, I made reference to relative market sizes. For fun I again researched the market sizes for SAN vs. NAS...astounding:
According to Dataquest, NAS last year was a $68.2 million market and projected to become an $8.3 billion market in 2004. SAN was a $1.8 billion market last year, and expected to grow to $40.4 billion in 2004.
NAS: $68m to $ 8b
SAN: $1.8b to $40b
While researching these numbers it occurred to me that EMC is readying a product to sell into the NAS market but NTAP is not preparing to sell into the SAN market (except for converting SAN customers to WAFL / NAS customers). I like the fact that EMC is now selling into both areas, but if the EMC NAS product doesn't sell then my joy is rather muted.
IMO, in the evolution of storage it is almost a certainty that SAN & NAS will be mixed/blended and found together in the larger corporate storage systems. NAS has performance limitations when it is used to do large-block data transfers (large-block I/Os with databases ) and SAN can only connect a limited number of clients to a disk array. Which sub-system is used will depend on whether the request is for a small file or a large-block data transfer. As has been previously discussed on this thread, the huge storage centers will most likely be connected by distributed nodes at the edge so information is put closer to the users. My research is showing VoIP, media, entertainment (VOD - 10MB per minute), data, audio- are all going to be big drivers of this blended storage environment going forward the next few years. Bodes very well for NTAP investors IMO.
Merry Christmas thread,
Eric
Btw, have you seen IBM's new machine:
"…running about 2,800 million instructions per second (MIPS) or 90 billion transactions daily…priced at several million dollars per machine"
zdnet.com |
