Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

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

To: Donaldm who wrote (11231)	9/25/2000 12:46:31 AM
From: Gus	Respond to of 17183

That decision is still up in the air. I agree. EMC is going to spend $10 billion in R&D and interoperability initiatives over the next five years effectively turning itself into an extension R&D lab for the IT departments of its large installed base. The construction of the Software Interoperability Labs -- 1,000,000 square foot facility across the street from EMC HQ -- and McDATA's plans to construct a $75 million facility -- 500,000 square foot on 90 acres -- in Colorado indicate to me that they may want to keep control over McDATA as they accelerate programs like this one between Microsoft, EMC and Yesmail.com EMC2 Corporation and Microsoft Microsoft SQL 7.0 Server Enterprise Edition is the database engine yesmail.com relies upon for 24x7 uptime and consistent high-performance. "When we picked the Microsoft platform we knew we could scale it through a lot of distributed transactions, but we needed some help around ensuring SQL Server 7.0 was truly reliable in a non-stop environment," says Jungck. "That's where EMC2 Corporation came in." yesmail.com put their core database in EMC's Symmetrix Enterprise Storage System 3830, an advanced, intelligent storage and retrieval solution that provides a highly available and scalable environment for yesmail.com. "EMC's Symmetrix is providing us with a very high-performance, reliable support system," says Jungck. "We are leveraging EMC's TimeFinder software, which allows us to create Business Continuance Volumes (BCVs) in background mode. The BCVs are mirror images of active production volumes that can be used to run simultaneous tasks in parallel with one another, offloading workload compression and saving network capacity. For yesmail.com, that means continuous uptime and constant access to its valuable data." "EMC even wrote a couple of custom solutions using EMC Control Center-NT Utilities software, where they provided utilities that allow Windows NT to mount and unmount volumes hot, while the servers are actually online. These play with the deep down kernel pieces of the operating system and are unique product offerings for Windows NT. Now we can migrate our transaction logs, which are up-dates of the minute-by-minute changes to our core database during the day, to our backup database, also connected to the Symmetrix. "We are leveraging TimeFinder to move the BCV volumes back and forth so that we can, in a sense, hand off the data in the Symmetrix itself. That way it doesn't have to go through our database servers and impact the network performance. There's not even one moment when our database server goes off-line. Should our primary database server go down, we can cut over to our back-up server and it will be in sync working off of the Symmetrix. There's no back-up time window where the database is offline." microsoft.com The other thing that McDATA does is it sets a very public platform for EMC to recruit more small hardware and software companies with complementary technology. That gets tougher and tougher to do for a company now worth over $220 billion. Jack McDonnell and his crew parlayed less than $10 million in 1982 venture capital into $230 million worth of EMC shares in 1995 -- about 13 million shares that are now worth over $11 billion assuming none were sold -- when they first sold it to EMC. When Jack McDonnell came up with a cogent plan for fibre channel, EMC allowed him and his crew to rebuy into McDATA less than 2 years later. Jack McDonnell's shares are now worth over $1 billion and his products are being designed into the SANs of the vendors with the most robust SAN implementations. Avalon promises to evolve along the same lines because their high-performance archiving software is already mature, field-proven and fits smoothly with EMC's Rich Media initiatives in several key areas -- broadcasting, medical imaging, internet content, etc. The flagship product for Avalon is the Avalon Archive Manager (AAM). AAM provides a file level interface to automated storage systems from a number of different manufacturers. Our software provides a level of abstraction of where the asset is physically stored. This allows the user or the application to store and retrieve the asset by an intuitive file name. AAM takes this asset and stores it on the appropriate medium without any further intervention on the part of the user. When the asset needs to be retrieved, the user merely asks for it by name. AAM then checks its database to locate the physical location and returns the file electronically to the requesting party. It's that simple. ava.com Softworks is another interesting acquisition that may prepare the ground for the day when EMC Software starts to sell software to its competitors. After all, nobody has quite the same expertise in first generation (ESCON) and second generation (Fibre Channel) storage networking technologies that EMC has. It also looks like EMC is way ahead of other storage vendors in supporting IP and optical networking too. SOFTWORKS specializes in developing enterprise data and storage resource management solutions for policy-based management of storage resources and optimization of business application performance and availability. Our products are used globally by more than 2,000 customers, including 88% of the Fortune 100, and over 58% of the Fortune 500........ softworks.com .......EMC will also show Fibre Channel data being quickly transported long distances between SANs over IP. The company's package consists of EMC Symmetrix storage arrays, a Connectrix switch, replication software and a Cisco Metro 1500 or Nortel Networks OPTera Metro dense wave division multiplexing (DWDM) router. At least one user is excited about the prospects of sending storage data across IP networks. "Our long-term goal is to be able to do backup and disaster recovery across long distances at a reasonable cost," says a storage resource manager for a large retailer in Texas who asked not to be identified. "The high cost of network lines has been one of the biggest obstacles in preventing us from doing that. With the advent of [metropolitan-area networks] and inexpensive cross-country fiber, we are looking forward to doing remote backup using Gigabit Ethernet," he added. His sites have more than 14 terabytes of EMC Symmetrix storage...... ........ EMC's optical SAN package is shipping. nwfusion.com Then there is, of course, Data General's Aviion server business. Bob Dutkowsky was the Executive Vice President in charge of Marketing and Channels at EMC before MR sent him to turn around DG. Under the conditions of the merger, EMC cannot sell DG for two years after the close of the deal so Bob Dutkowsky is most certainly exploring his options here. Thus far, they are still waiting for DG's sales to bottom as they repurpose its well-regarded technolgy at certain niche markets like data warehousing, high-end NT server consolidation and the health care industry. Here again the relative autonomy and full support that they gave McDATA in developing its fibre channel strategy is a powerful recruiting tool. Healthcare is very promising. DG already ranks as #16 in Healthcare Informatics top 100 IT providers. 66 out of the 100 companies in that list focused exclusively on the healthcare industry and had 1999 revenues that range from $1.2 billion to $9.2 billion. healthcare-informatics.com