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Technology Stocks : EMC How high can it go? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Tony Viola who wrote (6706)	6/11/1999 12:07:00 PM
From: Nathan L.	Respond to of 17183

Tony, I think what Bob was referring to was HP's "5-nines: 5 minutes" initiative as described in a research report (part of which I'll paste below). The only problem with HP's point of view is that 99.999% of the time, the downtime is due to HP's servers and NOT EMC's enterprise storage. Maybe HP should change the meaning of their initiative to reflect that. Here it is: "The MC256 will be integral to HP's achieving its goal of offering data centers end-to-end availability of 99.999% uptime by the end of 2000. (HP markets this strategic objective as "5-nines: 5minutes" — meaning there will only be five minutes of planned or unplanned downtime per year for the server, storage, database, key application, and network routers.) The MC256's architecture allows microcode and hardware upgrades to be made while it is running — there is never a need to bring it down. Moreover, to further increase reliability, the MC256 has no single point of failure (including mirrored cache and dual-active paths) to all major components. Note that from HP's perspective EMC's Symmetrix is still included in HP's five-nines program — EMC and HP are still committed to delivering the future benefits they have promised to mutual customers." Here is what Michael Ruettgers had to say in a recent interview that can be read in full at news.com Q: How do you address HP's criticism that EMC's architecture is aging and isn't good enough to fit into HP's goal of 99.999 percent uptime? A: I find that humorous on two points. One is that they are replacing ours with a competitor who they acknowledge is probably three years behind us. So they said our architecture is 10-year old architecture, does that mean that Hitachi's is 7 years old or 13 years old? But clearly they are replacing it with architecture that is behind us in terms of years. In fact, we have been the only people who have completely enhanced our storage systems in the last year and we did it again recently. So that doesn't fly. Most of the places that customers lose availability is in server delays not in storage systems. Beginning in the 90s, yeah, it was the storage system. Today it's the server. Their servers actually fail more than our storage systems. Part of the working relationship with them was to get their own products to work better. We don't have an availability problem with our storage systems.