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Technology Stocks : Son of SAN - Storage Networking Technologies -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: J Fieb who wrote (1456)	8/31/1999 1:50:00 PM
From: J Fieb	Respond to of 4808

Here's some thoughts from the video professionals on HWPs Transoft move......... emediapro.net Last month, Star Wars: Episode 1 opened to record audiences. How things have changed since I saw Star Wars in 1977! Back then, no one cared about "sci-fi"; admitting you were a fan meant becoming a social outcast. This time around, even TIME proudly displays Star Wars on its cover. So what's made the difference? It's not just that science fiction has become cool. It's that everybody knows about Star Wars and Captain Kirk. Phrases like "Use the Force" and "Beam me up" are regularly used by political pundits and business professionals alike. How does this affect network storage? As I see it, the single greatest fault in network storage is that nobody knows about it. There are currently many innovations in optical storage, both in the networks that support these drives and the software to leverage them. All these innovations make storage easier, faster, and, hopefully, more cost-effective. But nobody knows. How do I know? With NAS, for example, I still hear how wonderful this "new" concept is. This despite the fact that Microtest and Ornetix (now StorLogic) invented NAS almost seven years ago! And NAS has been widely available for the last three years. This is why I believe the latest buyout trend is good for the industry. Yes, mergers and acquisitions are part and parcel of the high-tech industry; they also exist in network storage. Of course, they can go bad when they're poorly executed, but I believe they're essential to the future of optical storage, providing the needed impetus to take technology to the next level. That's why the latest round of purchases shows promise. when worlds collide In recent months, Quantum bought NAS pioneer Meridian Data and Hewlett-Packard acquired SAN pioneer Transoft. Maybe there's even something to be said for Plasmon picking up Philips' WORM business. Meridian Data launched the innovative Snap! Server and with it, a successful ad campaign for the product. But Meridian couldn't keep buying double-page spreads in PC Week forever, let alone expand to other business pubs. It also couldn't go out and educate the market on the merits of NAS. Now, with Quantum's huge corporate presence, it can. Why? Because a lot of people pay attention to what Quantum is doing. After all, it has impressive reseller and service center networks. MIS will certainly hear about NAS now that Quantum is involved. It also certainly won't hurt the Snap! Server technology itself to have access to a ready supply of contemporary hard drives for boosting its performance (and maybe failover capability). Fortunately as well, Quantum promises to keep the same Meridian engineering and support team together after the acquisition so the product can grow and improve. Hewlett-Packard will generate waves by acquiring Transoft with its SAN Manager gateway package. By establishing a common gateway standard through its vast reseller network, HP will go far in promoting SANs to the general audience. And SANs at some point in the future will give optical storage an "in" to corporate networking as an archiving tool. On its own, Transoft couldn't have popularized SAN technology as quickly or established the much-needed standard gateway to SAN storage. More importantly, it couldn't establish a broad support network the way HP can--an absolute must when re-architecting network storage the way SANs do. Plasmon is certainly the best hope (after the Philips acquisition) to leverage those remaining WORM users and promote newer optical storage solutions to them. With a broad range of tape, MO, and CD/DVD jukeboxes, Plasmon offers a much more promising future than they would have had otherwise. help us corporate titans, you're our only(?) hope Are there optical storage technologies still out there that could use a lot more promotion? More support from the reseller community? Greater rates of adoption? Maybe even the backing of a major player to promote them? You bet. Procom's data pump technology beats the perceived industry leader Network Appliance's products. Anyone interested in using RAID NAS must look at both. XIOTech's REDI (REaltime Data Intelligence) backplane technology provides a nifty "SAN in a box" approach to storage. It provides I/O more efficiently than other products and should be considered for corporate ecommerce or data mining applications. TenXpert Technologies' TenXpert Network Server is a little-noticed competitor in the thin server market. Recently, the company added support for Cygnet's id 100 Deskside CD jukebox, a wonderful medium duty system for both CD-ROM and CD-R. The TenXpert server support for the unit makes it a no-brainer for a departmental-level tool. It simply doesn't get any easier than this for CD duplication and archiving. Knozall's FileWizard is probably the finest storage management and HSM product for the Wintel/NT/NetWare platform. I can't understand why this wonderful product hasn't generated the kind of excitement it should. Anything that automates the transfer and removal of inactive files should be a must-add-on to any optical storage system sale. It remains to be seen how well these latest acquisitions do in the marketplace. But the pressure will continue to build to move technology from a small, innovative company to the next step, where it is integrated into a widely respected product line with extensive support and training. Unless the innovators quickly educate the market and develop a support network, they must look to the seasoned pros for this.