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

To: buck who wrote (2835)	3/24/2000 6:18:00 AM
From: DownSouth	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 10934

Many, many people have been trained on it. Many of those people have moved into positions that have buying power. Those people will be very reluctant to re-train their storage management people. They will be equally reluctant to change policies and procedures that have stood the test of time. The market for NTAP is NOT EMC's customer base. It is the SUN and NT customer base. The market is expanding so rapidly, what the EMC customer base decides is almost irrelevant. BTW, training for implementation of NTAP filers is almost nil for an NT and/or UNIX sys admin. Now for IBM trying to break back into the EMC fortress, your remarks are very significant. I still have some technical misgivings about their [NTAP] scalability, simply because of the limitations of Ethernet. Suggest you study NTAP's architecture a bit more thoroughly. Interface to the network to which app servers and clients are attached may be multiple e-net, ATM, FDDI conections. Usually the app servers share one or more "dedicated" segments, isolated from the client LAN. More importantly, connection to storage devices is through FC or SCSI. (We are waiting for a secret joint development from BRCD and NTAP any day now.) I have heard of some configs where the SUN server and the NTAP filer were mounted in the same rack with a copper FDDI connection between them. The storage arrays were then connected via FC to the filer. (ORCL running on the SUN.) hooking up big-britches EMC Symms for truly large-scale data storage is a small step. I doubt that it would happen, because neither one of the companies wants to do it. Its been done and in production at customer insistence and driven by NTAP's cooperation. So far, it has been EMC that fights these implementations. I would be greatly surprised to see NTAP suddenly gain the experience and ability to deal with terabytes on the scale that EMC does. There are many ways to skin the multi-TB cat. A filer farm of TB filers with or without clustering provides great scale. The idea of multiple TB being controlled by a single EMC is the storage management equivalent of mainframe computing. It isn't necessary. BTW, a whole bunch of ex-EMC engineers are at NTAP now. The experience to build multi-TB filers is there and will happen. I, too, respect both companies and will enjoy whatever happens.