The lack of warnings from NTAP during the end of this, their 3rd quarter (and hardest) is a good sign, imo. But I would like to hear others' opinions about this.
(Q3 closes on about 1/25, I believe--same as CSCO's.)
Also, I learned a few new facts about the EMC mid-range NAS product. To sum it up:
1. No File Level ACL's for Windows (CIFS).
2. No mirroring.
3. Marginal performance, compared to NTAP, in benchmark tests. (With no RAID "on" versus NTAP with RAID always "on".)
4. Product has heightened awareness of NAS architecture within the EMC customer and prospect base, causing customers to call NTAP for comparisons.
I am expecting NTAP to report 100% growth (year over year) this quarter. This will be in line with expectations. The reason I say this is:
1. Cutting IT budgets, which is truly happening, causes CIOs to find new ways to meet growth requirements.
2. Adding filers rather than general purpose servers to an enterprise avoids the purchase of additional app servers, avoids the hiring of additional sys admins and satisfies both the need for more app CPU power and the need for added storage capacity at a lower cost than adding app servers with direct attached storage.
3. In the process of making these decisions, opportunities for server consolidation are realized, which avoids future costs as well.
4. The hoopla that EMC made about its NAS offerings is some of the best marketing money that NTAP never spent.
This is pure speculation on my part and is not intended to be a credible analysis of NTAP's shortterm performance. |
