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

To: DownSouth who wrote (3296)	5/16/2000 8:26:00 PM
From: jhg_in_kc	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 10934

DS, I'm curious how you would respond to this evalution of EMC vis a vis NTAP. <<To: jhg_in_kc who wrote (10221) From: Bill Fischofer Monday, May 15 2000 11:15PM ET Respond to Post # 10222 of 10227 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. >>