Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Technology Stocks : All About Sun Microsystems -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: E_K_S who wrote (28039)	2/21/2000 10:15:00 AM
From: Bill Fischofer	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 64865

Re: Jini and storage Jini seems well suited to the NAS market aimed at small to mid-sized business. I'm not sure it's more than marketing buzz in the enterprise space. The NAS space is getting pretty crowded these days and companies such as NTAP and EMC (via their Clariion line acquired along with DGN) are leaders here. Storage is segmented like most areas of IT. The main EMC market, for example, is 1 TB and up. One of the reasons they bought DGN last year was to allow them to better address the sub-TB market. It's only when you get into TBs that headcount scalability concerns start to dominate the purchasing decision. Such considerations become overwhelmingly dominant in the largest accounts which are already pushing over 100 TB and will pretty soon be demanding PB (petabyte) level storage solutions. I agree completely that software is the key to manageability which is why the fastest growing segment of EMC's business is their software. It's also why CA just bought SSW last week and why companies like VRTS have been so successful. (LGTO also used to be in this camp but has recently stumbled. Dead duck or buying opportunity?) The point is that this is a very different business from SUNW's traditional processor-centric focus. The whole key to headcount scalability is for storage to be processor-independent and have no particular allegiance to any processor or OS vendor. It simply makes no difference to EMC or to its salespeople whether its boxes talk to Solaris, HP/UX, Tru64Unix, OS/390, AS/400, Windows 2000, etc. While the traditional processor vendors may be able to make this shift technologically in their storage engineering departments, the real challenge is making it emotionally in their sales forces and in their executive suites.