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Technology Stocks : EMC How high can it go? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Gus who wrote (10587)	7/6/2000 9:00:48 PM
From: Gus	Respond to of 17183

IBM trading blows with EMC By MARC SONGINI Network World, 07/06/00 ARMONK, N.Y.-- Big Blue recently picked up its marbles and walked away from a storage area network (SAN) management standards body led by EMC, claiming the latter is not interested in open standards. Specifically, the controversy surrounds the NUMA-Q division of IBM, which makes high-end Intel-based servers that run Unix applications for data warehousing and business intelligence, and the 50 or so strong FibreAlliance standards group. The breakup should come as no huge surprise: When the NUMA-Q division joined the FibreAlliance, it was then independently owned Sequent Computer. It also depended heavily on EMC's Symmetrix line of storage servers -- a product family now directly in IBM's storage division's crosshairs. Glenn Sullivan, a senior product manager at NUMA-Q, sent a letter of resignation to the director of the FibreAlliance standards body dated June 21. The epistle states: "Unfortunately, the FibreAlliance never achieved its goal of gaining industry wide support in addressing the issues of interoperability and open standards for SANs..." The letter claims that the membership of the FibreAlliance never extended to the major server and storage vendors. This resulted in "an EMC centric solution set and not a vendor agnostic initiative." IBM is better served by participating in the Storage Networking Industry Alliance (SNIA) and the Fibre Channel Industry Association (FCIA) to maintain open standards and interoperability, claims Sullivan. The move by IBM comes after EMC's March withdrawal from the Storage Performance Council (SPC),which tests and evaluates the performance of storage devices. Sources claim that move by EMC was the straw that broke the back for Big Blue. An EMC spokesperson put the shoe on the other foot. "IBM is backing away from industry standards," he says. "Sequent was a meaningful participant in the FibreAlliance, but IBM is clearly putting competitive issues over the need for open standards." The FibreAlliance has had considerable success in putting standards before the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) for approval, he says. nwfusion.com Notes: 1) DataGeneral's Aviion compete directly with Sequent. 2) Because the highest volume segments of the server business are fast becoming commodities, it is natural to expect a server vendor to advocate a homogeneous solution with the server and storage from one vendor ostensibly to reduce complexity. EMC represents a serious threat because it allows a true heteregeneous computing environment ranging from mainframes to UNIX servers to Intel servers. 3) Total storage sales are expected to exceed total server sales by 2003. Put another way, storage is expected to account for 75% of the typical server/storage budget in a few years. Management of fast-growing storage resources accounts for anywhere from 2x to 10x the cost of the actual subsystem. This is where EMC makes its money. 4) Some of the more zanier architectures out there contemplate throwing servers and storage appliances at the IT infrastructure of a corporation like some kind of wild game of Lego, but that kind of setup eventually tends to implode as a company grows, merges or restructures. Put another way, most companies will opt for an architecture where their valuable data resides on a solid storage bedrock which works seamlessly with their distributed OS, their distributed applications including distributed applets.

To: Gus who wrote (10587)	7/7/2000 5:44:55 AM
From: JDN	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 17183

Dear Gus and all: Well, whether this Joint Alliance is a threat or not it is an implied one and unfortunately may hinder EMC's stock price until the results, one way or another, are known. For the life of me, I dont understand why they wish to "Commoditize" anything, to me that makes everyone a loser. Maybe now its time for EMC to make an alliance with SUNW?? Personally, I question these alliances but dont see how one company can go it alone if everyone else is in an alliance. JDN