Disruptive Technology???
"BlueArc Hopes Its New Server Will Bypass the Web Bottleneck
By DON CLARK
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL"
Message 15491966
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"In benchmark tests at its headquarters here, a rack full of BlueArc components fetches data files at five to 10 times the speed of competing products. And the company claims two other dramatic consequences: About 100 times more users can tap into one server than other storage appliances, and each server can manage up to 200 trillion bytes of data, or 30 times more than rival machines.
"This is absolutely disruptive technology," Mr. Pesatori proclaims.
Not everybody agrees. Some say BlueArc hasn't identified the right problem, let alone solved it. Customers are just beginning to validate the box's performance on real-world tasks. And BlueArc's machines still need to be attached to computer servers that run software such as databases and do the actual processing of information. That could introduce delays.
Regardless of its impact, the company's quest underscores some major changes in the computing landscape. For years, from Apple Computer Inc.'s first machine to Seymour Cray's initial supercomputer, innovative general-purpose computers were the ticket to stock-market success.
PCs changed everything. Intel Corp. began churning out millions of microprocessors for those devices, and makers of large and small machines started using those commodity chips rather than developing their own proprietary circuitry. As manufacturers standardized on other key components -- including programs like Microsoft's Corp.'s Windows -- computer makers with original designs became an endangered species.
But some specialized box makers did build markets. EMC Corp. of Hopkinton, Mass., introduced storage systems that packaged processing power with arrays of disk drives. In the 1990s, Network Appliance Inc. of Sunnyvale, Calif., helped popularize the concept of appliancelike storage servers that can be shared by multiple networks, not just serve up files to one system. That's much more convenient for companies with complex networks, and the device came along just as the Web caused storage demands to skyrocket. Economic worries have hurt both companies' stocks lately, but EMC's market capitalization still stands at more than $70 billion, while Network Appliance's is greater than $7 billion.
So venture capital has flowed to storage-related hardware. Established companies and start-ups are now racing to deliver the next hot box in the field.
To name just a few: Tricord Systems Inc., based in a Minneapolis suburb, is trying to slash costs by clustering many storage appliances with software that manages them like a single data repository. Nishan Systems Inc., Fremont, Calif., develops storage switching devices that are based on Internet protocols, which are easier to deploy than the standard ways data is usually pumped to storage systems. A secretive start-up called Zambeel Inc., also in Fremont, this year plans to deliver storage hardware providing "virtually unbounded scalability and performance," vows marketing director Greg Marek.
But BlueArc may stir the most controversy. A presentation by the company at a Lehman Brothers investor conference in San Francisco Thursday attracted a standing-room-only crowd. Mr. Barrall gamely answered a string of questions, but some audience members seemed to have trouble understanding the new box and where it would fit in the crowded market.
One questioner raised a pivotal issue: Other makers of storage servers use Intel chips for their underlying intelligence, betting that the giant chipmaker's huge research budget and economies of scale will bring speed improvements at the lowest cost. While some of the data pipelines between those chips and disk drives are relatively slow, major improvements should start arriving this year.
BlueArc's so-called Silicon Server design is a contrarian bet -- that conventional-style storage devices will never adequately close the performance gap. These systems inevitably run into delays, Mr. Barrall argues, as their microprocessors execute software and retrieve data from memory chips to complete storage tasks.
The company's boxes are expected to go on sale in the second quarter at less than $100,000, a price designed to compete directly with Network Appliance. Shridar Subramanian, a marketing director at that competitor, argues that reliability and other issues worry customers more than performance. He also questions whether special-purpose hardware can be updated quickly enough, and whether an ultrafast storage server would find itself slowed down by the other servers on networks that run business applications..." |
