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Technology Stocks : EMC How high can it go? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: jhg_in_kc who wrote (10221)	5/15/2000 11:15:00 PM
From: Bill Fischofer	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 17183

Re: EMC and NTAP I do not view NTAP to represent a significant competitive threat to EMC. If you listen to the NTAP conference calls it is clear that NTAP management recognizes that their main challenge is scalability. Remember, the emerging storage-centric paradigm is not about hardware or software. It is about people and productivity. The overwhelming need is to scale the productivity of storage administrators as fast as storage demand is itself growing. The reason companies look for solutions beyond traditional processor-attached storage is that this architecture does not scale productivity very well. NAS is an attractive stepping stone, especially for small to mid-sized organizations, because it is "cheap" and provides an immediate productivity boost beyond what can be achieved with processor-attached storage. However, as storage continues to grow the scalability limits of NAS are themselves reached and the problem reasserts itself at a higher level. This limit is currently somewhere in the low terabyte range. NTAP's current top-end product, the NetApp F760, offers up to 1.4Tb of storage capacity. By contrast this would be considered a small Symmetrix configuration. Understandably, the market covered by this storage range is quite large and growing rapidly, which is one of the reasons EMC bought DGN to provide products targeted at this market. The EMC value proposition is that customers can easily integrate CLARiiON and Symmetrix systems and can "grow into" the EMC product line as their storage demands continue to increase. The bottom line is that the storage market is large enough to support many players and both EMC and NTAP should continue to do well here. This is not a zero-sum game and investors really shouldn't view these two companies as an either/or proposition.

To: jhg_in_kc who wrote (10221)	5/16/2000 11:06:00 AM
From: Robert C. Barry	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 17183

jhg in kc You have a great way of zeroing in on the posters that are the most knowledgable on a given subject. Bill Fischofer (EMC)and DS (NTAP)seem to fill that bill. DS posted a report from the Gartner Group which does a great job of defining SAN and NAS. It is called "Storage and Hosting Strategies" and can be downloaded from The DS posting. It is 51 pages long but is very informative without touting one system over the other. Thought that might help your inquisitive mind. RCB