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

To: Douglas Nordgren who wrote (2571)	1/21/2001 12:40:30 AM
From: Gus	Respond to of 4808

The most notable feature of Hitachi's Lightning that was already known by most of its competitors before it was even officially introduced last year is the proprietary internal crossbar switch that provides it with 6.4 Ghz of internal bandwidth. This technique comes right out of the EMC pre-Infiniband playbook. In the 90s, EMC demonstrated that by rapidly increasing the intelligence inside the box -- ICDA (1990) plus Mosaic2000 (1995) equals Enguinity OS (2000) -- storage processing can be independently established at parity with data processing and in the process gradually become the more strategic procurement decision than data processing. Before EMC came along, storage was always considered to be peripheral to the processor. EMC accomplished this by rapidly increasing the bandwith of the backplanes and scaling the controller technology along with it. These proven techniques allowed them to develop very quickly a software business that grew from $25M in 1995 to about $1.4B last year. If I'm not mistaken, they have doubled the the bandwidth inside Symmetrix each year for the last 3 years and will probably do so again this year. Emulex hinted that the DragonFly target chip was qualified for a new Symmetrix program that does NOT displace an existing vendor. Obviously, this type of rapid-fire product development requires a fault tolerant hardware platform that can support the rapid increases in processing power otherwise who would pay top dollar for a box with impressive specs that reboots more frequently as features are added. For reference, EMC's latest Symmetrix employs multiple backplanes to produce 1.6 Ghz of internal bandwidth and a highly scalable PowerPC-based controller technology that runs the Enguinity Operating System inside the Symmetrix. Enguinity currently consists of about 2.2 million lines of code that enable Symmetrix to perform 144 parallel operations concurrently. That high-performance reservoir provides the juice for a software business that probably booked about $1.4 billion in revenues last year with about 8 software products providing 80% of revenues. EMC has also opened the APIs (application programming interfaces) of Enguinity to independent software developers and xSPs who are rapidly buidling a broad suite of software products that exploit the intelligence inside the box (Symmetrix) as a prelude to exploiting the intelligence outside the box (ESN). A particularly useful piece of info in that MR interview is his sense of proportion of how the data deluge from the CRM and supply chain deployments of the last few years will start to occur this year. There is an accompanying wave of heavily ROI-oriented data analytic deployments that typically follow those application-driven data deluge that will benefit immensely from the SAN architecture. Not surprisingly, the major server vendors all have major high-end server rollouts underway targeting this series of waves. Hitachi certainly has a very competitive box, and some heavyweight partners (HWP, Veritas, Computer Sciences) but Hitachi still has to prove that it can scale and navigate this promising platform outside its traditional mainframe customer base at a time when more storage networks are being deployed and the advent of Infiniband -- a switched fabric open standard which initially proposes to replace the PCI-bus in servers and eventually became the standard I/O technology for servers and storage -- promises to escalate the product development wars to yet another level.