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

To: Bill Fischofer who wrote (3304)	5/17/2000 11:56:00 AM
From: DownSouth	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 10934

Bill, glad you came by. You obviously have a great deal of insight from the EMC perspective. I admit that mine is from the NTAP perspective, so I expect to learn much from you. I agree with your networking vs storage analogy. EMC's focus on the enterprise core is, of course, a result of its success on the raised floor. NTAP's focus "on the edge" is a result of its success in the UNIX environments and now the NT environments of software developers, engineering groups, graphics-oriented organizations, and ISPs. In Gorilla Game terms, the two were in different bowling alleys. I strongly disagree that NTAP is "comfortable with the current processor-centric world order..." Both NTAP and EMC are "intent on disrupting the current world order and completely reversing the traditional role between processor and storage." NTAP's view is that a central storage network should be surrounded by a farm of application servers. NTAP's biggest competitor is not EMC. It is SUNW, then HWP, IBM, Dell, CPQ and all the RAID subsystem manufacturers that attach to these UNIX and NT CPU boxes. So EMC and NTAP are fighting the same battle. The incidence of their direct competition with one another (EMC and NTAP) will dramatically increase as customers first decide to consider alternatives to the traditional CPU attached storage models and put EMC and NTAP on their short lists. NTAP already realizes that EMC and NTAP could co-exist, with EMC's software as the storage management umbrella over NTAP's filers. I am not sure about the technical barriers in doing this, and there may not be any. I believe the barriers are from marketing and support concerns. Jerry