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

To: DownSouth who wrote (37781)	1/11/2001 10:41:52 AM
From: Bruce Brown	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 54805

DS - Great posts on SAN/NAS, EMC, Network Appliance, WAFL, etc... . Thanks for the effort. In terms of the G&K portfolio parade. Moving on to interest rate cut cycles and the history of the stock market following the cuts, I read an interesting post which I link below. I highly recommend reading the post which comes from Tobin Smith's Changewave website. The subject matter is the historical results of 21 interest rate cut cycles since the FED was founded in 1913 and the results on the stock market put together by Ned Davis Research. Note that on 17 of the 21 occasions, the stock market responded with that first rate cut being the bottom. The other 4 times the bottom was marked by the second rate cut being the bottom. We've had one rate cut and the FED is meeting at the end of this month. The bond market has already priced in a cut at that meeting. Time will tell if history proves to be in line this time around as the previous 21 times. Is the market beginning to look beyond bad news, or is that process not yet worked out of the system? fireboards.fool.com BB

To: DownSouth who wrote (37781)	1/11/2001 10:44:42 AM
From: quidditch	Respond to of 54805

DS, I thought this post of yours on the NTAP thread was very illuminating w/r/t the dis-integration issue and the power implicit in NTAP's capabilities in the storage space. It may help sharpen some of the parameters for which GG analysts are probing in settling on titles. Message 15128633

To: DownSouth who wrote (37781)	1/11/2001 11:07:56 AM
From: Knight	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 54805

Possible competitors to NTAP's WAFL? Until about a year and a half ago, I worked in the storage management software space and was involved in research related to fibre-channel/SAN technology. Your description of NTAP's WAFL filesystem's ability to "dis-integrate the filesystem from the application server platform" reminds me of products from several other firms that I investigated at that time. One of these was Mercury Interactive (which has since been acquired by IBM). They had a product called SANergy that, as I recall, did something similar. There were also a couple of other companies that had products with the same basic concept. (I can't remember their names, but I think they were rather small companies and I suspect have also been acquired by now if their technology was valuable.) What I'm getting at here is: I wonder if there are other technologies that could eventually compete with WAFL? (I may be able to dig up the names of those other companies. Will see what I can find.)

To: DownSouth who wrote (37781)	1/11/2001 11:27:30 AM
From: Knight	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 54805

Let me see if I understand then... So, in other words, NTAP could go into an existing shop that's running a Fibre Channel SAN, install the NTAP filers and have them run over the existing Fibre Channel "plumbing." In this case, the NTAP filers would serve files to the FC-connected servers in a manner that would be similar (in some ways) to the way traditional NFS servers served files to systems via remote mounts over traditional TCP/IP networks, but with two extremely important differences: 1) Remote NFS mounts were never good for applications that required reliable filesystem writes due to cache coherency issues. For example: database vendors always required database storage to be directly attached (via SCSI or SCSI over FC). NTAP's filers eliminate these caching issues. Also, their filers, I believe, are the only NAS devices supported by all the major RDBMS vendors for "non-direct-attach" access. (Is this still the case, DownSouth?) 2) Remote NFS mounts were also undesirable for mission-critical applications because TCP/IP I/O was much too slow and required much more server overhead than direct SCSI I/O. WAFL addresses the performance issue by offloading much of the filesystem processing from the host. (Downsouth, any idea how fibre-channel-attached NTAP filers' I/O performance/overhead compares to I/O performance of "direct-attach" SCSI-over-fibre-channel storage via traditional filesystems?)