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Strategies & Market Trends : Gorilla and King Portfolio Candidates -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: buck who wrote (25126)	5/22/2000 9:12:00 PM
From: DownSouth	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 54805

I would contend, and so would EMC, IBM, DELL, CPQ, HWP, and others that SANs achieve the same goals defined here, with better (much, much better) performance and far, far better return on existing investment. Of course they would contend the same. They are trying to sell stuff, too. Arguing over performance and ROI without specific scenarios is just a waste of time here, so let's not. I do invite you to look at the benchmark data and see that NetApp's performance is better than a locally attached disk drive. I would wager that EMC has no desire to centralize most company's storage. In their market space, loosely defined as the Global 2000, such a centralization would be impossible. They do believe that it is easier to administer a SAN for huge amounts of data (which I define as greater than 1TB) than it is to administer a NAS. EMC's counter strategy against NAS is to make an issue of the 1.4TB limitation of a single filer by promoting centralization of the data away from the edge. You are just plain wrong about SAN being easier to administer compared to NAS, but I can't prove it to you here. You gotta go see it. Make no mistake that managing a NAS filer is any easier than managing any other server on a network. But it most certainly is easier to manage an NTAP filer than any other server on the network. The filer was designed to be easier. Its simpler and faster and eliminates many of the file management and backup/restore tasks of UNIX and Windows. And this one has a special, purpose-built OS, with vagaries of protocol that are foreign to most, if not all, enterprise storage management personnel. Vagaries of what protocol? Its the same protocol set that the sys admin has been using with Unix and Windows. NTAP introduces no new protocols whatsoever. Also make no mistake that data served thru ethernet of any flavor is served faster than data served from an I/O channel like SCSI or Fibre Channel. Data served by a NTAP filer through a LAN is faster than data served from an I/O channel like SCSI or FC. The reason being that data delays are not caused by the speed of ethernet, but by the delays of writing and reading that data through a general purpose OS using a general purpose file layout. Delays caused by LAN network contention are easily overcome with fatter pipes, or reduced contention over any given pipe. Fibre Channel SANs increase data availability beyond that of filers, too. A SAN allows data access from any other server should the primary server go down. An end user has no way to access the data on a filer that goes down...unless you've bought a mirror-image NAS filer. You gotta study NTAP's architecture better, sir. With clustered configs there certainly is an alternative path to the data if a filer goes down, with no mirroring whatsoever. And its transparent to the end user or application server. Buck, I am no expert on EMC, and will not pretend to be. I am pretty current on NTAP, however. It seems to me that you have a very good understanding about NAS in general, but not about NTAP's architecture and operational principles. I hope I can help you get up to speed so we can really get into this. As far as tying SAN and NAS together, its already happening, so our business would be in trouble from the start. NTAP's products with have NAS as their system architecture for OS, LAN integration, and file management, and SAN as their architecture for storage networking. The battle between NAS and SAN is over. They both won. The battle now will be for the survival of FC as 10GB-Enet develops and a battle between two companies with competing products--EMC and NTAP.