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

To: DownSouth who wrote (3327)	5/18/2000 9:52:00 AM
From: tekboy	Respond to of 10934

Online Storage driveway.com xdrive.com idrive.com Optical Storage osta.org Fractal Storage? dip.ee.uct.ac.za tekboy@allgreektome.com

To: DownSouth who wrote (3327)	5/18/2000 10:30:00 AM
From: Bill Fischofer	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 10934

Re: Online, optical, fractal storage George Gilder has coined the term "storwidth" to describe the evolution of storage services which will follow the proliferation of high bandwidth. As network speeds approach those formerly found only in computer backplanes, the historical notion of what constitutes a computer system can be separated into its separate logical functions and distributed without performance penalty. Thus storage becomes a network service which itself could be outsourced. Companies like Driveway, X-drive, and I-drive are early examples of this trend, though they seem mainly focused on the consumer market. A more interesting example is Storage Networks, which has filed for its IPO under ticker STOR. This is a company worth watching as it is targeting the corporate outsourced data management market. Interestingly, STOR was founded by a group of ex-EMC employees and most of its physical infrastructure is EMC equipment. Optical storage has been "just over the horizon" for well over 20 years. Magnetic storage, however, just keeps improving and defying persistent rumors of its impending death. In theory, as magnetic storage continues to increase in density you eventually reach a point (the so-called superparamagnetic limit) in which the tiny spots of magnetism used to represent bits lose stability and are prone to "flip" randomly. Beyond this limit, optical technology should take over. Current thought seems to be that this crossover point should be reached at some point in the next decade, but one never knows since the magnetic folks have proven to be exceedingly clever and resourceful over time. While this sort of basic technology transition is obviously something for companies like SEG, HDD, and WDC to fret over, I do not see this as a problem for companies like EMC and NTAP which are buyers of storage components. EMC and NTAP customers really don't care how these boxes store data. I'm not familiar with the term "fractal storage" though by context I wonder if the speaker wasn't referring to holographic storage. See, for example, enteleky.com for an overview of this technology.