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Technology Stocks : Son of SAN - Storage Networking Technologies -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: D. K. G. who wrote (2533)	1/12/2001 2:50:04 PM
From: J Fieb	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 4808

ebay's trouble....they need a SAN What's Wrong With EBay? (01/11/01, 7:15 p.m. ET) By Mitch Wagner and Ted Kemp, InternetWeek EBay's persistent site failures stem from a lack of coordinated IT planning and a centralized database and storage structure that creates a single point of failure, insiders and experts say. The series of mishaps that led to eBay's 11-hour site crash on Jan. 3 was reminiscent of 15 similar outages between August 1998 and November 1999, including one in June 1999 that made the popular auction site unreachable for a record 22 hours. Ebay (stock: EBAY) in a written statement blamed the latest blackout on "unrelated" glitches in storage hardware and database software. But experts scoffed at the notion that a string of such severe outages could be a coincidence. Indeed, five years after the site's launch, the company hasn't installed redundant storage hardware to take over if the main storage system fails, said one former eBay staff member who asked not to be identified. The IT department alerted management to the risk of storage failure a year ago and recommended an upgrade to redundant storage arrays, but the expense wasn't approved, the source said. What's more, eBay's application architecture makes it difficult to move to a more resilient load-balanced server farm. The initial eBay applications were designed by former Oracle employees who believed in relying on a single large database. To this day, a single Oracle database supports item listings and auction operations, the source said. While eBay has begun to split the database for redundancy, resource constraints and a divided management have gotten in the way of major changes, the source said. The source described eBay as a marketing company that adds features aggressively and worries about the infrastructure later. IDC analyst Dan Kusnetzky agreed. "It sounds like they've been trying to address issues as they've been discovering them, one by one, with no one sitting back and saying, 'What are we trying to accomplish and what's the best way to do it?'" EBay uses Sun Enterprise Servers in tightly integrated clusters, which group servers using special software and hardware interconnects so that they appear to be a single system to the user, application and systems manager. That approach is easier to administer, but it's also more prone to breakdowns because servers tend to share central resources, such as an operating system and storage system, Kusnetzky said. Other high-traffic sites use more loosely integrated server farms, in which a large number of small, low-end servers perform identical functions in a redundant configuration. Search engine Google, for instance, uses 4,000 Linux servers that do searches and serve up Web pages in parallel, while Yahoo uses clusters of BSD Unix servers. If one server goes down, the rest pick up the load. The downside is that management is more labor-intensive, because each server must be administered individually. The server farm approach could be troublesome for a site like eBay, because users need to access the same centralized data simultaneously and in real time, said Munjal Shah, CEO of Andale, a service that helps small businesses manage auctions on eBay and other auction sites. "It's not like Yahoo, where they can copy the data from a relatively static data center to servers all over the world," Shah said. "At eBay, everybody needs access to the current price." Despite eBay's IT problems, observers are quick to note that the company is thriving financially, largely because it runs about 90 percent of all online consumer auctions. In its latest financial report, for the quarter ended Sept. 30, eBay said its revenue doubled from the previous quarter, to $113.4 million. Net income totaled $15.2 million. "An eBay that's up part of the time is still probably better than a little auction site that's up all the time," said Yankee Group analyst Steve Vonder Haar. Following a difficult 1999, eBay was relatively stable in 2000. The site suffered only one prolonged outage, in February, precipitated by a hacker attack on eBay and other big consumer sites. EBay says it has achieved 99 percent uptime for the last four quarters. Even half-day outages won't threaten eBay's position, analysts say. "It's a little bit like what happens if the electricity goes out at Sears one day: Over time it's not going to have any significant impact," said ABM AMRO financial analyst Kevin Silverman. Still, eBay said in a statement that it plans to upgrade hardware and distribute its Oracle database to many separate servers to ensure that in the event of a failure only part of the site goes down. That project has been underway for eight months; it should be completed by May 2001. EBay's 99 percent uptime is in line with other consumer sites such as Amazon.com and Yahoo, said Daniel Todd, chief technologist at Keynote Systems, which measures Web site uptime and responsiveness. But eBay should be held to tougher standards than consumer sites, Todd said. "If Yahoo goes down, I can't get news or e-mail for 20 minutes or an hour, but if eBay goes down, I might miss out on $1,000 auction that I'm running my business on," he said. Indeed, the transaction-heavy eBay better resembles an online brokerage. One difference: Brokerage sites are based on mature systems; eBay developed its systems from scratch. "The trading sites have got decades of effort," Shah said, "and it shows." 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To: D. K. G. who wrote (2533)	1/13/2001 6:41:54 PM
From: J Fieb	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 4808

Denis K G., Who is DataCore...... datacore.com DataCore Software Completes Financing of Over $35 Million Storage Networking Software Provider Receives Additional Funds to Help Scale Quickly, Serve Growing Industry Need Fort Lauderdale, Fla. (July 31, 2000) - DataCore Software(tm) Corporation, an innovator in storage networking software, announced today that it has successfully completed second round equity funding of over $35 million. This latest round will help scale DataCore's strategic and organizational growth, both organically and through acquisition. Van Wagoner Capital Management, a multi-billion dollar mutual fund, led this investment round. New financial investors JT Ventures, Banc of America Securities and Dain Rauscher Wessels joined initial investors OneLiberty Ventures and New Enterprise Associates in this latest round of funding. Intel Capital was also an investor in this round. "With the growth rate of the storage networking market projected at more than 50 percent annually for the next three years, we're looking at enormous opportunities," said George Teixeira, president and chief executive officer of DataCore Software. "The market for storage networking is at an all-time high. This capital will be used to help expand our sales and marketing efforts to serve the needs of our customers - and help us to grow and scale with them in the future." "DataCore is an early innovator in providing storage server software for the Intel Architecture Platform," said Tom Macdonald, director and general manager of Intel's Fabric Components Division. "Intel looks forward to working with DataCore to optimize its software to take advantage of both Itanium(tm) processor platforms and the InfiniBand architecture, a new input/output standard that will deliver new levels of scalability and reliability to all types of servers." DataCore's Teixeira adds, "The collaboration with Intel will aid DataCore Software's efforts to accelerate the adoption of Intel's IA-64 product family and InfiniBand technology in our targeted market space - storage networking. Today, Fibre Channel solutions dominate; the talk is SCSI over Internet Protocol; and clearly InfiniBand has the momentum to be the next general purpose I/O standard. Likewise, proprietary processing systems dominate storage control, and systems based on Intel's IA-64 product family will provide users with much more powerful solutions and greater freedom of vendor choice. Our SANsymphony(tm) software is designed to give storage networking users total flexibility in all these evolving choices." DataCore SANsymphony Available Today for SAN Management and Control As storage needs continue to rise dramatically, DataCore Software has developed a powerful software-based management and control solution to help companies meet the challenges of managing storage in highly fragmented and proprietary environments. Launched in May, SANsymphony, the company's flagship storage domain server software, supports all leading storage devices from storage servers running on UNIX(r), Windows(r) NT, Netware(r) and Linux(r), to the high-speed fibre channel devices that form the backbone of storage area networks. Its cross-vendor compatibility makes SANsymphony the first shipping solution that bridges disparate islands of storage. SANsymphony converts these `islands' into a single networked storage pool, letting IT managers and network administrators easily allocate storage capacity on an as-needed basis, using a simple `drag-and-drop' interface. Now they can move these `virtual' volumes among different servers -regardless of the underlying operating system. About the Company DataCore Software Corporation is an innovator in storage networking software. Its first product, SANsymphony, helps companies respond to accelerating growth and change in storage requirements by creating a shared storage pool from networked storage elements. Through channel and OEM partners, DataCore serves information-intensive organizations. Founded in 1998 by some of the industry's most respected storage technologists, DataCore is headquartered in Ft. Lauderdale, Fla., with branch offices in Research Triangle Park, Silicon Valley, and Europe. Worldwide, the company has over 120 employees focused on delivering storage software solutions. The company is privately held. DataCore is an active member of the Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) and the Fibre Channel Industry Alliance (FCIA). For more information, call 877/780-5111 or visit www.datacoresoftware.com. Intel (NASDAQ:INTC ) is a registered trademark and Itanium is a trademark of Intel Corporation. All other trademarks are property of their respecti

To: D. K. G. who wrote (2533)	1/17/2001 10:06:28 AM
From: J Fieb	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 4808

Denis K., A guess buying the dips was a good idea? Wednesday January 17, 9:50 am Eastern Time Press Release TrueSAN Networks Secures $30M in Second Round Funding SAN JOSE, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Jan. 17, 2001--TrueSAN Networks, Inc., whose leading-edge technology is poised to revolutionize network infrastructure with more scalable, more manageable, and more flexible storage solutions, today announced the completion of a $30M second round of funding. Woodside Fund led the financing round, with additional investments from Merrill Lynch, QLogic Corporation, JT Venture Partners, Credit Suisse First Boston, Spring Creek Partners, and Finisar Corporation. TrueSAN will use the funding to expand its sales, marketing, and recruiting efforts as well as accelerate engineering initiatives that will enable the company to take a dominant position in open storage infrastructure solutions. ``TrueSAN has the people, vision and technology to deliver open storage solutions that will fundamentally change the storage landscape,'' stated Vincent M. Occhipinti, co-founder and managing director at Woodside Fund. ``TrueSAN's aggressive market strategy, coupled with strong industry and enterprise confirmation, indicated to us that TrueSAN will secure a leadership position in the storage networking arena.'' TrueSAN's next-generation storage solutions are designed to meet the unrelenting and unpredictable demand to store endless amounts of data. TrueSAN's core technology is designed to overcome several major limitations of existing storage solutions: Scalability: TrueSAN's modular and massively scalable architecture, known as MetaFabric, enables companies to store and protect a virtually unlimited amount of information, within a common and centralized storage framework. Unity: TrueSAN unites network-attached storage (NAS) with storage-area networks (SAN), enabling enterprises to realize the benefits of seamless information sharing and collaboration. Versatility: TrueSAN delivers unparalleled information accessibility by seamlessly linking storage networks with optical networks and IP networks, eliminating islands of storage with a global storage infrastructure. Management: With advanced software, TrueSAN has implemented powerful yet easy-to-use storage management designed to dramatically simplify and lower the costs of storage implementation, administration, and protection. ``By providing unmatched scalability and virtualization, we believe TrueSAN's next generation architecture could revolutionize the storage landscape,'' stated Amit Chopra, Enterprise Storage and Communications Analyst at Credit Suisse First Boston. Shaji John, managing partner of JT Venture Partners, said, ``The exponential growth in storage demand is driving the need for new storage architectures that can scale-on-demand with the high rate of storage resource growth. TrueSAN is addressing this need head-on and is well positioned to be a leader in next generation storage solutions that will provide unprecedented performance, scalability, and versatility to the storage infrastructure. JT Ventures is excited to be partnering with such a dynamic company.'' ``We are honored by the tremendous show of support by this impressive list of investment partners,'' stated Thomas Isakovich, Founder, President and CEO of TrueSAN. ``This validation will help us continue to recruit top engineering talent, build a world-class direct sales force, and strengthen our brand presence in enterprise and service provider accounts. Combined with the knowledge and experience of our talented team, we now have the tools necessary to execute on our vision for more scalable, more manageable, and more cost-effective storage networking solutions.'' About TrueSAN Networks TrueSAN Networks, Inc., headquartered in San Jose, California, delivers enterprise storage networking systems, software, and services for building scalable, intelligent, and universally accessible storage infrastructures. Using unique storage architecture and software technology, TrueSAN solutions overcome the limitations of existing storage systems and deliver unparalleled scalability, versatility, and ease of use with unbeatable price/performance. TrueSAN solutions provide Internet businesses, service providers, multimedia firms, and growing enterprises with an innovative way to better leverage invaluable information assets. About Woodside Fund Founded in 1983, Woodside Fund has one of the longest and strongest track records of success in early stage venture capital investing. All Woodside Funds have performed in the upper quartile of the industry for venture capital partnerships formed in their respective years. Woodside Fund's latest partnership, Woodside Fund IV, which had its final close in April 2000, invests between $5 and $10 million in early stage ventures in Internet Protocol infrastructure and e-Commerce infrastructure, located in Northern California and the West Coast. The Fund serves as the lead or co-lead investor in most of its portfolio companies. PS They have 80 job openings listed. Lots of them in sales. They have a plan.