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Technology Stocks : The New QLogic (ANCR) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: princesedi who wrote (27247)	6/7/2000 10:17:00 PM
From: J Fieb	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 29386

Tuesday, June 6, 2000 Straight Talk On Storage Pricing, Standards ORLANDO, Fla.--The smoke from Florida's forest fires is creeping up on illusion-happy Walt Disney World, but at least some storage vendors attending Gartner Group's Storage 2000 conference are checking their smoke and mirrors at the door. Take the statement that got the loudest applause at today's storage-network Masterminds panel discussion. The topic was the cost of each vendor's storage-management software. After Computer Associates, Hewlett-Packard, and IBM's Tivoli division checked in, EMC's engineering program manager Lou Przystas pointed toward his fellow panel members and said, "Whatever these guys charge, we'll charge more." Market leader EMC, for those not in the know, is known for charging a premium. During Monday's Storage Scenario session hosted by industry analysts Nick Allen and John Monroe, topics included the approaching storage architecture wars and the incredible shrinking costs for increasingly powerful disk drives. Allen talked about the pending war between Fibre Channel, the IP network, and the Infiniband standard over what the future storage infrastructure will be based on. The tussle is good news for customers who've just started investing in storage networks based on Fibre Channel, because he expects the other standards to be at least three years away. And Fibre Channel technology won't stand still. Monroe said that the requirement for E-business data to exist online, along with shrinking prices for increases in capacity, will make tape obsolete in a few years, for all except the deepest archiving. EMC's Przystas shared the stage Tuesday with Allen; Ron Riffe, a strategic planner at Tivoli; Steve Harriman, a storage VP of marketing at CA; and Charlie Kamkowski, a storage marketing manager for HP. Przystas defended EMC's Fiber Alliance as an organization, with numerous vendor partners trying to set management standards as quickly as possible. "We've already created a de facto standard for [Simple Network Management Protocol] connectivity," says Przytas, "and we've submitted it to SNIA," the primary industry association for storage-network-management standards, for approval. The other three vendors said when they expect to work management standards in their products. According to Riffe, Tivoli will "meld some base standards into products" before the summer is over. And Riffe is trying to make sure that the storage-management functionality won't be too tightly integrated with Tivoli's enterprise-management framework. Harriman said CA will continue to work with EMC on Fiber Alliance, because he doesn't expect broad conformance for at least two years. "A lot more has to happen with a broad set of disciplines and standards," he said, "but we'll support the standards when they're available." Finally, Kamkowski said HP's storage platform is built to take advantage of standards when they emerge. "But that will take at least a year," he said, "because I'm not as optimistic about the ability of standards bodies to work so quickly." A final comment came from the peanut gallery. The vendors pretty much agreed that storage-network management would be worth about 10 cents more per megabyte of storage. When Allen asked the audience for a show of hands for paying even pennies more per megabyte for management, few were raised. Allen questioned the lack of interest. A guy hollered from the back of the room, "We need to know what we'll save first." -- Martin J. Garvey