This is an excerpt from an article that describes three actual SAN deployments by EMC, Compaq and Xiotech (Seagate) that provides insight into why EMC's newest architecture, ESN, is growing at torrid rates. Here are some direct quotes from EMC's last 3 quarterly earnings reports:
1Q2000
....EMC's SAN revenues were more than $250 million in the first quarter, up more than 60% sequentially compared with the fourth quarter of 1999....
2Q2000
....SAN (storage area network) revenue reached nearly $400 million in the second quarter, up 55% sequentially compared with the first quarter of 2000 and more than eightfold over the year-ago period, as customers around the world deployed the EMC Enterprise Storage Network (ESN)....
3Q2000
....SAN (storage area network) revenue was $480 million in the third quarter, up nearly fivefold compared with the year-ago quarter, as EMC extended its market lead in this rapidly growing area with the widespread acceptance of the EMC Enterprise Storage Network (ESN)....
Avoid SAN overspending: Match features to your needs
Mission-Critical
....WorldStor Inc. in Fairfax, Va., is a storage service provider, offering storage as a utility to companies that have elected to outsource their storage operations. The company needed very high reliability because of the nature of its business and wanted a vendor with a proven SAN architecture.
Says Steve Bishop, the company's chief technology officer, "We stepped back and looked at exactly what we were trying to provide: an enterprise-class storage utility service that customers could bet their data on."
Bishop eliminated some vendors almost immediately. "The reason that we did not look too closely at some [vendors], including Compaq [and] Xiotech . . . is that we knew these companies were not far enough along in their development cycle to provide us with an architecture that was as stable and as well-tested as one from one of the big players," he says.
Bishop ultimately chose four EMC Corp. Symmetrix SANs, for two reasons: EMC's proven architecture and its extensive portfolio of management software. "Supplying raw capacity is the easy part [of our business]; it's managing the availability and the performance of the data that resides on that storage that poses the challenge. And those challenges are the very things that EMC develops its software to address," Bishop says.
He has worked with the SANs for a year and says they're "rock solid. We haven't had any issues." The four SANs hold between 5 and 10 terabytes (TB) of data each and use EMC's Symmetrix 8730 and 8430 storage array controllers, its Celerra File Server to make SAN volumes appear to remote clients as network-attached storage and its Connectrix Fibre Channel switches.
WorldStor makes extensive use of EMC's Control Center management software, plus Symmetrix Remote Data Facility for storage mirroring, TimeFinder for replication, Volume Logix for storage virtualization and Symmetrix Data Recovery software.
WorldStor's Symmetrix SAN didn't come cheap - Bishop says that the multimillion-dollar price tag that his company paid for its four EMC SANs is high, but he adds that WorldStor has saved thousands of dollars in software development costs because it was able to purchase software tools from Hopkinton, Mass.-based EMC instead of developing them in-house.
"So, in the long run, our total cost to offer the service to our customers, we don't believe, is any more expensive than some of the [storage service providers] in this space that are attempting to use more commodity-based products," Bishop says....
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