Gus, is this your material or from EMC marketing? I'm including some
comments, which you can take or leave, but I think it is a more balanced
view of what was talked about today.
> NTAP reported a back-ended loaded quarter that missed revenue estimates,
> but beat earnings estimates. Domestic sales went down while international
> sales went up. NTAP also guided down analysts towards the lower end of their
> 10-15% sequential quarterly revenue growth projection.
NTAP's CC also stated that this quarter is always problematic because of
Christmas/News Years in the last third and the fact that they cross a
calendar year boundry budgeting cycle. This year it was even worse because
of the IT slowdown and budgets being frozen till finished and then released
which pushed after-the-holidays business towards the end of January.
BTW: the reason EMC was down today is that there is a rumor out there that
they had the *exact same problem* this January, a soft start due to the
budget freeze/release process.
> Of direct relevance to EMC is that NTAP shipped a surprisingly low 600 of their
> newest filers (F840) during the quarter, which brought their filer ASPs up by 10%.
> 15% of those flagship filers represented upgrades so about 510 units were directly
> comparable deployments.
NTAP's CEO said that the 840, like the 760 at its introduction, had a jog
in units because capacity jumps up so much - more storage per unit. They said
the unit trend was exactly like the 760 introduction.
> The F840 competes directly with EMC's IP4700. Each F840 contains only 1 Pentium
> III processor and regular memory while each IP4700 contains 4 Pentium III processors
> and Rambus memory. EMC sold out 250 IP4700s during 4Q2000 when it was GA
> (general availability) for less than 30 days.
The F840 contains one processor and the IP-4700 *needs* those extra processors
because its performance is abyssmal. See the following for the 840 and IP-4700
respectively:
[NTAP 840: 1 PIII 733 processor 40 disks, 1 filesystem, 11626 ops, 2.8ms]
See: specbench.org
[EMC IP-4700: 2 PIII 733 processors, 100 disks, 18 filesystems, 11451 ops, 8.1ms]
See: specbench.org
The results of these benchmarks show EMC uses 2X the processors, more
than 2X the disks and 18X the file systems to get numbers close to
NTAP. Note also that EMC *DOES NOT* have RAID enabled for these
benchmarks which, if enabled, would even make these numbers look
worse.
EMC needs those extra processor slots!
> In January, EMC introduced the FC4700, which uses the same 4-processor platform
> as the IP4700 and which can be converted to the IP4700 with the simple change of
> software and the interface card -- FC4700 requires fibre channel while IP4700 requires
> gigabit ethernet. EMC also provided an upgrade path -- software and controller board change --
> between the FC4500 installed base (30,000-40,000 units) and the FC4700, which practically
> assures it of a successful debut. EMC indicated that like the IP4700, they already had the
> FC4700 out in the field for 90 days before the product announcement.
This is a problem for EMC: are they a SAN vendor or a NAS vendor?
From what the analysts have said: EMC still leads with the Symmetrix,
then the Celerra/Symmetrix and lastly the IP-4700. It seems they
are now selling Symmetrixes and throwing an IP-4700 on top for
free in an attempt to seed units?
This is what an analyst has said in the last week.
> The key here is that EMC designed 4 processors into the IP4700, both for redundancy
> and performance. This allows them to introduce new features like software at a fairly rapid clip.
They did it for redundancy, then why don't they benchmark with RAID
enabled? What's the point of having extra processors when a disk
dies and the system is then dead?
More importantly: what customer wants clusters for availability
inside the same box? You don't get redundancy or availability
benefits inside the same enclosure because if that enclosure
gets zonked, you have no redundancy.
The customers that want real redundancy, want it outside the
box from clustered systems.
The IP-4700 processors are a performance feature, not an availability
feature.
> It looks like EMC is on track towards displacing NTAP at top of the NAS market by the
> end of 2001. I suspect that for all practical purposes the NAS market will be combined
> with the SAN market in industry reports considering how fast the SAN/NAS hybridization is
> taking place. Celerra HighRoad and Celerra SE are unique SAN/NAS hybrid products and
> one can argue that at the hardware level, the FC4700 and IP4700 represent a
> new type of SAN/NAS hybridization.
We'll see how that plays out. Don't believe your EMC marketing
propaganda, Custer thought he was in an easy battle also... |
