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

To: dwayanu who wrote (2044)	1/12/2000 8:48:00 AM
From: DownSouth	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 10934

NTAP filer equivalents could (at least theoretically) be functionally duplicated by any competitor with a lot of money and a couple of years. Competing filers could be installed incrementally alongside or in place of NTAP filers with little disruption to the enterprise's business. Gotta take serious exception to that. First of all, the speed, reliability and simplicity of NTAP's filers are inherent to NTAP's proprietary OS (ONTAP) and proprietary method of storing and retrieving data (WAFL). SNAPSHOT/SNAPRESTORE are also proprietary and minimize the effort required for users to save/restore files. No file server matches NTAP's 99.99% + reliability for a non-clusered filer and even better reliability for clustered configurations. No file server matches NTAP's performance. I won't go into detail here, but would point you to benchmark data if you insisted. Bottom line is that NTAP filers provide local disk performance over the network. Switching costs are very high--More hardware required (servers), more disk drives required to even approach NTAP's performance, much more sys admin time required to support, and loss of some capabilities (SNAPSHOT, clustered failover) that are simply not available from anyone else. OTOH, NTAP's primary differentiator for caching is their appliance approach, which puts NetCache on a filer, giving the software capabilities of NetCache with the simplicity, reliability, speed of filers.