This article contains an amusing exchange between NTAP and EMC reps at a recent Comdex session. NTAP has seen its NAS market share go down from 75% to 32% in the last 3 years reminiscent of the way that Sun lost market share in its own Solaris environment to EMC in less than 5 years from 100% to 34% or how IBM lost control of the mainframe storage market to EMC from 74% to 34% in less than 5 years.
Now, NTAP wants IDC to count unit shipments instead of revenues to determine leadership in NAS. I wonder what Quantum's SNAP would say since they were the leader in NAS unit shipments last year.<g>
....."EMC is making more in revenue because on a per-unit basis they are charging three times as much," said David Hitz, founder and executive vice president of engineering at Network Appliance.
Hitz's comments stirred applause from the audience and a sharp comeback from the competition.
"We just passed Network Appliance on NAS revenue -- not volume or units, but revenue -- which is usually how you count these things," Parker quipped.
nwfusion.com
It also contains a mischaracterization of EMC's vision of networked storage which they first articulated in the 1995 annual report. EMC introduced its first software product (SRDF) in 1995 and booked around $25M in revenue during the first year so this vision statement was more than just vaporware. NTAP then was still a struggling storage hardware vendor which had just changed management and was still refining the appliance concept. It had just barely reached the $15M annual revenue milestone.
....The move toward iSCSI is part of a growing trend in the industry to push data sitting on large back-end storage servers out onto a network where more users in a company can access the information. Unlike EMC, Network Appliance has centered its storage philosophy around this network mantra since its inception but now finds itself meeting head-to-head competition in the network-attached storage (NAS) market.
EMC co-heads the IETF working committee on iSCSI with Lucent and with Cisco as Technical Advisor. EMC also heads the Storage Networking Industry Association which has a working group on iSCSI. Like most people who understand the risk-averse nature of the storage business, EMC thinks that iSCSI has potential in SAN over WAN environments but it won't be ready for another 2-3 years.
Anyway, enough with the nitpicks. This is an excerpt from the 1995 EMC annual report that I think is fitting to post here now that EMC is expected to lead both SAN and NAS markets this year. That will finally put an end to this stupid and false debate between SAN and NAS fueled by NAS vendors which couldn't see the complementary nature of the two technologies and therefore did not invest in SANs. Note the distinction between the architecture (SAN) and the interconnect (Fibre Channel).
New Markets for Intelligent Storage are Taking Shape
Client/server computing in the early 1990s let businesses give user departments more freedom to create and leverage information. Now, in the mid-1990s, the shift to data consolidation in centralized facilities is ensuring that information is properly managed while it is freely accessible by authorized users.
Fast approaching is the next stage: the true information-centric enterprise, where applications and information reside on the network. Because intelligent storage is "where information lives," independent storage systems will soon be attached directly to the network. In this emerging paradigm, storage systems will be the engines of information, no longer subservient peripherals to computers.
In a study by Strategic Research Corporation (November 1995), 71 percent of respondents said storage should be "independent of servers" or "consolidated in a storage server." Delivering value through intelligence once again, EMC is developing software that will allow future EMC devices to understand requests for information files and send them to any location. In 1996 our first network-attached system will be introduced as we continue to emphasize fast time-to-market.
Our strategic plans for networked storage solutions led EMC in December to acquire McDATA Corporation of Broomfield, Colorado. McDATA, a leader in data center network switching solutions, brings us the expertise in high-bandwidth, high-speed connectivity which will help us become a leading supplier of open systems and network-attached storage for the enterprise.
The growth of the Internet also represents a major opportunity for EMC. As researchers at Morgan Stanley recently reported, "The Internet represents the next application development platform and ubiquitous access to applications regardless of location." Deregulation of telecommunications in the United States and abroad is encouraging the integration of telephony, data communications, information services, online business transaction, and realtime video and audio playback. These applications will trigger the need for extremely high-performing and high-capacity intelligent storage, for instant customer access to applications, and for storage and management of the volumes of data that such transactions will create. Video and audio applications will be especially storage-intensive. This scenario will require huge amounts of storage attached either to Internet servers or directly to the network. A number of the companies at the forefront of the Internet explosion already rely on EMC storage to manage their information.......
emc.com |
