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To: Eric L who wrote (26447)	6/16/2000 3:51:00 PM
From: DownSouth	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 54805

HDC posted this on the NTAP thread: Merrill Lynch Criticizes Server Vendors' Storage Efforts By Jo Maitland Heavyweight server vendors IBM Corp, Sun Microsystems Inc and Compaq Computer Corp took a hammering from top analysts at Merrill Lynch & Co yesterday for hedging their bets in the storage market. During a press event in New York Wednesday Steve Milunovich, managing director, securities research and economics and John Roy, director of the technology group at Merrill Lynch presented their latest findings on the state of this market. According to their analysis, server-attached storage is giving way to storage area networks (SANs), which is growing 67% per year. However, 92% of the entrenched storage market today is in this server-attached space, trickling along on 1% annual growth. This is the market IBM, Sun and Compaq play in. "They are hoping that despite the explosive growth for storage systems, companies will continue to purchase systems that bolt on to the server," said Milunovich. "But this will not happen as it does not scale and is not reliable enough." He said that all the scalability and reliability is now concentrated on the network which Sun, IBM and Compaq have to get into. Both analysts criticized Sun, which yesterday announced new network-based storage and software products. Despite Sun president Ed Zander claiming this was the biggest announcement from Sun in the last five years, John Roy was unimpressed. "They've been saying that for at least the last three," he said. The main driver increasing the demand for storage is companies going online and increased bandwidth availability. Merrill reports that DoubleClick is adding 250 Gigabytes of storage space or 750,000 digital photographs to its network everyday. The research and economics company found that Fibre Channel is becoming the leading transport protocol, but will be usurped by Gigabit Ethernet over time. Putting the IP stack into hardware and 10-Gigabit Ethernet single-chip transceivers will be enablers, the Merrill analysts said. As a result they predict that NAS (network attached storage) and SANs could merge into an ultra high-speed IP network running both file and block level commands over Gigabit Ethernet. Although NAS and SANs are complementary today, NAS is probably a disruptive technology to SANs long term, Milunovich said. Companies in Merrill Lynch's favor include EMC, Network Appliance and Veritas among others. "We expect EMC to reign as the king of enterprise storage for the next three years as the current standards battle in the SAN market is perfect for EMC," said Milunovich. He added, "Network Appliance should thrive and over time threaten EMC as NetApp increases its capabilities. EMC may need to develop a NAS product in response or even acquire a company in this space," he said. Courtesy of the Yahoo thread.