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To: Boplicity who wrote (5182)	11/20/2000 11:57:13 AM
From: 993racer	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 10934

you might want to ask this question on the gorilla & kings candidates thread

To: Boplicity who wrote (5182)	11/20/2000 12:03:44 PM
From: DownSouth	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 10934

As much 2,000 Terabytes Of Storage is the amount of the contract. If you have ever worked to win and fulfill large federal contracts, you know that phrases such as "as much" don't mean much. The real question, which we are not likely to hear from Dell, is what is the minimum commitment from the Feds on this contract and how soon, how fast. Winning a contract like this could be great for a company or it could be devastating. Often a company will bid low prices at ridiculously low margins to win, but hope that the orders don't flow for the low margin products until technology reduces the vendor's build cost so that margins are based on future products at current prices. Why will it be so hard for the likes of SUNW, IBM, CPQ, EMC and DELL to eat away and collectively replace NTAP as the NAS leader? Because none of them have the rights to use the innovations that cause NTAP's technology to provide higher performance, higher reliability, simpler operation, and larger scalability per $ of total cost of ownership. Forget this NAS leader stuff. It's a storage game now. NAS is just a connectivity technique. The game now is who can provide the most for the least on the storage side of the network connection. NTAP has at least a 2 year lead by that measure. For years all of the box makers and EMC tried to fight off NTAP and Auspex by criticizing the NAS architecture. Now they are rushing to provide products of the NAS architecture. None of these products have the price/performance of NTAP's disrutptive ONTAP/WAFL/multiprotocal software platform. And now NTAP is changing the rules of the game with its "end-to-end content management" layer of capability on top of the filer and cache platforms. GM, I get the impression that you either skipped the posts or have not been really understanding the discussion here about NTAP's technological advantages in storage. Perhaps movement of the stock price in the TA context is more important to you. If so, that's great for you. If you are trying to do some dd on the company, please start by reading my 3-part series, visiting the NTAP web site (most excellent), the EMC web site (also very good). I don't mind your questions, but I am a bit shocked that after these many months you are asking NTAP 101 quiz questions.