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

To: mauser96 who wrote (34075)	10/30/2000 1:38:55 PM
From: mauser96	Respond to of 54805

The Wall Street Transcript recently had a series of interviews about storage. Andy Watson (Senior Director for Strategic Technology at Network Appliances) said that NTAP is primarily a software company. They ship software that is "tin-wrapped" rather than being "shrink-wrapped". The software and hardware are shipped in an integrated unit. These filers are not only good for their originally designed purpose(where each query to the database produces a large amount of data) but also to transaction intense databases. "Most transaction intense databases are constrained by write performance- how quickly they can update their logs. Our machines excel at at write performance." He expects that general systems vendors (IBM,SUNW, etc)are "gradually losing their grip on the storage element in their system, just like they've lost their grip on the CPUs, their operating system, the application software and the networking". He regards EMC as the long term competition. Over the next year or so, fibre channel will go to 200 MB per second, for a 2X increase. In the same time Gigabit Ethernet bandwidth will be increasing at a 10X rate. NTAP is committed to Gigabit Etherneton the front end, but also is strong in using fibre channel on the back end, so they are pragmatic. They expect more deployment of IP over Gigabit Ethernet as the market embraces NAS. In another interview Shelby Seyrafi, an analyst, said that at the present time only 11% of storage is not attached directly to servers. By 2003, IDC projects that 38% of disks will be networked. Dataquest has a projection of 75% for the same period, so there is a lot of question about the exact speed of the transition. I continue to be impressed that the coming changes in storage are the most sure of any gorilla game in progress. The speed of the transition may be a critical factor in the stock price. The latter stages in a bear market are marked by a tendency to throw out the baby with the bath water and today they are throwing out NTAP.