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Technology Stocks : Network Appliance -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: pirate_200 who wrote (1829)	12/13/1999 12:09:00 PM
From: DownSouth	Respond to of 10934

Good find, Pirate. For those interested, NTAP's first filer was 486-based with about 8GB of storage! The port of the kernal from Intel to Alpha took a weekend, according to corporate legend. (I heard this from the guy was responsible for doing it.) They decided to form a porting team to begin the work on a Monday. An engineer came in during the weekend to scope out the level of effort. He finished the job on Sunday evening, so the porting team became a QA team. Engineers remain vigilant to the fact that they must be able to port all of their software to new processors if required. Alpha has served them well in the last couple of interations of the entire product line. Moving to new 64-bit Intels should be not problem. I can't see them moving to AMD chips, though. Supply and reputation could become a problem. A few dozen megahertz will not matter. (No holy wars please, this is just my opinion, and the matter is not that important.) <g>

To: pirate_200 who wrote (1829)	12/17/1999 5:41:00 PM
From: Cirruslvr	Respond to of 10934

Pirate - RE: "If AMD continues on hotrodding their chips, I wonder if we'll see a low-end NetApp with an AMD chip?" That may be actually be a possibility down the road. But for now, it looks like NetApp is using AMD's Irongate (750) chipset to run the Alpha in their NAS products. "AMD already supplies its Irongate chipset for use in Alpha-based servers built by Network Appliance Inc." ebns.com The Irongate only supports one processor, but next year a 2-way capable chipset will be available that will offer other performance enhancing features. With this 2-way chipset, NetApp may be able to build FASTER products. And further down the road, 4 and 8-way capable chipsets are coming. Couple these chipsets with faster Alphas (21364) and NetApp's products should only get better.