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

To: DownSouth who wrote (2144)	1/20/2000 5:38:00 PM
From: sasha4477	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 10934

DownSouth, I know nothing about the technicals described in the Wall Street articles which were the subject of your response to a prior post. Your points are well taken and I trust you are probably correct about the author's lack of understanding and expertise. I suspect that he interviewed a few people and tried to distill whatever he was told for the subject articles. My speculation is that his understanding was limited and therein lay the confusion. On the other hand I cannot condemn him as harshly as you because his understanding of the technology is more advanced then my own. What I would like to know from you or others is whether you disagree with the conclusions of the article. They are as I recall that NTAP is the only play in the NAS arena and that Ntap breaks new ground with its SAN-NAS collaboration and is a leader in cacheing. I 'd also enjoy hearing your view with respect to the potential competition. To the extent that the author was attempting to distill the views of others i am also hoping he accurately reflected the investment conclusions of his sources. One final thought I'd like your perspective on concerns the SAN-NAS collaboration NTAP has undertaken. What is the niche that SAN is likely to occupy if indeed NAS is the superior technology. Why would SAN survive at all unless it has some useful purpose. Or is this a clever way for NTAP to expand its market by combining its standard with that employed by those not using its solution now. In advance I apologize for the confused thoughts to the extent they reveal my ignorance of how the technology ultimately is structured and is used. No pride in authorship here. In Advance I will thank you or anyone else for the perspective. I am long 2000 shares at split adjusted 24.

To: DownSouth who wrote (2144)	1/20/2000 5:59:00 PM
From: Beltropolis Boy	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 10934

>>The one advantage that fibre channel currently gives SANs over NAS is performance. Because fibre channel is dedicated to storage, it currently offers higher speed than an NAS on an Ethernet network - since there are various other types of traffic on the network. >Because NTAP's NAS architecture is FC based and in any case the ethernet network is not burdened by disk I/O...What is this guy thinking? thanks for missing me, DS. but given my post, perhaps i should've stayed away a wee bit longer ... <vbg> i'll concede that the piece is dumbed down, hence, my "plain language." for example, no mention of scalability, homo- (there's that word again!) or heterogeneity, or even cost. >An NAS appliance is not tied to a server like SANs are because it acts like a server itself - as an appliance linked to a network by an Ethernet card. perhaps the author was out the day they taught latin. a la the PSIX comma faux pas, that dash (-) should've been a for example (e.g.). re: FC, i believe the author meant that it's storage-dedicated not network attached storage-based. then again, it could be my jet lag. re: GE, i think the issue here is LAN traffic vice I/O. a quote i read the other day: "Network people learned a long time ago that 100BaseT in theory offers about 12-Mbyte-per-second throughput. But with overhead, you really only see 6 to 8 Mbytes." feel free to bust me out where i'm off base, -chris.