SP, >I am a NTAP investor. I follow very closely what the competition is doing . In a market with this potential everyone is scrambling like hell. Watch very closely what is being said and what is happening in NAS. From what I have been able to gather EMC is doing a poor job outside of their SAN environment. Don't be fooled about their NAS growth because it has have to have a SAN environment to operate in. I have my money on NTAP but you need to do your DD. If you are curious go to the NTAP site and read all of the DOWN SOUTH messages and then form your own opinions.
I have watched EMC and NTAP pretty closely for quite a while. EMC's story is definitely not NAS yet, but SAN is a very rapid grower also, and from a larger base at this point. Also, direct attached storage is still a cash cow. EMC's dominance at the high end, including their storage management SW, and interoperability across all important platforms, makes them the king, if not gorilla of storage. They are THE storage company of choice by all from the dot coms to the Fortune 500s. NTAP, has done a great job and has a great future, well, here's an opinion I expressed about them from a request from Ibexx over on the Intel thread just a few days ago:
To: Ibexx who wrote (125716)
From: Tony Viola Sunday, Jan 21, 2001 6:18 PM ET
Reply # of 125916
Ibexx, no, I don't have any NTAP. I missed it in its early runup days, then became concerned for its over-valuation. I'd still be leery of it getting severely price corrected, a la SUNW, if anything went wrong. NTAP did a great job establishing a franchise, no doubt about it. Problem is, I don't think the cost of entry to NAS is anywhere near that of SAN. EMC and Compaq, maybe more companies, have new entries in NAS. Compaq's is right up their alley, being half server and half storage, and all industry standard components. They can probably build it very cheaply. Thing is, how strong NTAP's following is. I don't know. You probably saw this:
Message 15219984
BTW, one advantage of this thread being so "anything goes" is that you don't have to say "OFF TOPIC".
Tony
This morning Laura Conigliaro of Goldman Sachs came out about NTAP, saying because of a slowdown in spending by some of the key customers in the communications area that would affect NTAP sales, and a very rich valuation, NTAP was not the place to put your storage investing money. She concluded by saying the place to put it was EMC.
Tony |
