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

To: Lucky888 who wrote (2933)	3/30/2000 10:07:00 PM
From: DownSouth	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 10934

Oh! OLTP. You said "OLTA". I thought the industry had progressed to some kind of new online transaction processing paradigm requiring a new acronym.<g> As you can see from above, that OLTP requires high speed connection between the storage devices and the workstation running the oracle database. NTAP's filer is too slow for this case and that's where EMC boxes that with fiber channels coming into play. Granted, thousands of concurrent users, depending upon the number of times/second on average they are hitting the Enter Key, can create a very high aggregate data throughput demand at peak times. Also granted, NTAP's largest storage capacity is 1.4TB for a single filer, supporting an OLTP application that required a single volume in excess of 1TB would be very difficult. And granted that multiple FDDI/ATM/E-Net connections between the RDBMS server and the NetApp filer (data server) may not be able to handle very data intensive, high volume OLTP apps. However, the profile of OLTP apps that would demand more than the NTAP filer architecture can provide are the very top of the market in the realm of airline reservation systems. Airline reservation systems have always required the biggest, baddest OLTP hardware architecture. (The most capable mainframes from Sperry (Unisys) and IBM have always had their biggest challenges in their application to airline res systems. (That's probably why EMC does that job so well, because OLTP is traditionally a mainframe environment.) I do not believe that filers would be appropriate there. But for a huge portion of the OLTP market below airline reservations systems, the NetApp filer will deliver the capacity, speed, and reliability required. Add its simple sys admin, low cost, and easy expansion and the NTAP filer is a good choice, especially when total cost of ownership (TCO) is considered. For the internet infrastructure marketplace where OLTP is really not the app model, the NTAP filer provides better response time, modular growth, better reliability, and a TCO that beats EMC hands down. (It may be important to note that Oracle actively supports connection of the NTAP filer to an RDBMS server as an NFS mount.) The next generation of ethernet and perhaps some new stuff coming from NTAP will change this situation dramatically, as ethernet surpasses the throughput of FC or NTAP offers some alternative connections between the RDBMS/App server and the filer data server. Increased disk capacity for filers will bring filers up to performance/capacity parity with EMC. TCO will then be the competitive differentiator.