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

To: DownSouth who wrote (3326)	5/18/2000 9:53:00 AM
From: Bill Fischofer	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 10934

Re: Raised floor, edge, etc. The term raised floor is descriptive of the controlled-environment in which centralized data processing has historically occurred. Because of their specialized cooling and cabling needs, mainframes sit in rooms that have raised floor structures which permit chilled air circulation as well as to hide the bulky cables which connect the various component boxes. Beyond the physical aspects, the key notion is centralized data management. Remember, in the information economy a corporation's data is literally its lifeblood. This is why corporations maintain a separate professional staff who do nothing but care for this information infrastructure ("infostructure"). The "edge" is a legacy of the rapid proliferation of PCs and workgroup servers. Classically, a department would purchase and deploy its own workgroup server because the central IT staff was not sufficiently responsive to its needs. While providing a short term relief, the result was often information disarray in which different departments within the same organization could not effectively share information. Such internal inefficiency is deadly in the hypercompetitive world of e-commerce which is why every corporation wants to recentralize data management. This, by the way, is the key historical reason why storage networks are separating from processing. Nobody is going back to the old days of a single mainframe serving all the information needs of a corporation. What is needed, however, is a single logical management structure that can integrate and ensure the integrity and smooth operation of data across the enterprise. With B2B ecommerce these needs now actually span beyond the enterprise to its customer and supply network, so the need for storage networks is growing rapidly.