Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Technology Stocks : Network Appliance -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: DownSouth who wrote (6097)	2/5/2001 11:43:22 AM
From: SecularBull	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 10934

Buying more on today's drop. LoF

To: DownSouth who wrote (6097)	2/5/2001 2:10:42 PM
From: riposte	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 10934

Storage industry action shifts to software Source: searchStorage Date: 01 Feb 2001 by: Paul Gillin, editor SANTA BARBARA, Calif. - It was billed as a storage conference, but attendees could be excused for thinking they had stumbled into a software industry meeting. If one thing was clear at last week's Merrill Lynch Storage Technology Conference held here, it's that disk drives are uncool and the future of storage is in software. With hardware prices plummeting more than 30% per year and storage area networks catching fire, vendors were scrambling to reposition themselves as the solution for tying everything together. ''The question is who's going to provide the software that dominates the SAN,'' said Thomas Kraemer, Merrill Lynch's lead hardware analyst. Added Merrill-Lynch CTO John McKinley, ''The company that provides good [storage management] software to me will own the relationship with me.'' That message was reinforced in numerous strategy statements from the leading vendors: EMC Corp. said it will spend $1 billion in research and development this year, 70% of that on software. Compaq's top storage executive, Mark Lewis, said the company will invest more than $100 million in storage companies this year, most of them software vendors, and refocus its storage strategy around software. ''We've built what we call a next generation software company,'' he said. Hewlett-Packard storage chief Nora Denzel said her company is shifting from a focus on servers to an emphasis on storage with the hardware serving mainly as a way to deliver software. Underlying the trend is what analysts believe will be a massive shift from server-attached to network storage over the next several years. It's a change that some people think will revolutionize IT organizations and the storage industry by turning hardware into a no-name commodity and establishing code as the only significant source of differentiation. ''Everyone is trying to `commoditize' everyone else,'' said Merrill Lynch's Kraemer. Added Russell Holt, GM of Dell Computer's storage group, ''The cost of storage hardware is more and more approaching zero.'' Not surprisingly, vendors are competing to deliver the operating system that ties everything together, a market that analysts agree is relatively open right now. Although EMC is the default front-runner at this stage, competitors hope that SANs will make it possible for new leaders to emerge who specialize in managing and troubleshooting very large storage farms. And the vendors are being quick to respond. Brocade CEO Gregory Reyes touted his company's ''intelligent fabric operating system'' as a switch-resident software bridge to unite heterogeneous storage devices. HP is building its storage strategy around its popular OpenView network management system, saying storage is just another in a long list of IT assets that OpenView can monitor. Peter Bell, founder of service provider StorageNetworks, Inc., hinted in his opening keynote that the software his company developed to rope together multi-vendor storage devices may be released as a commercial product. Compaq outlined a strategy it calls ''virtualization,'' in which all of a company's storage assets can be bound up into a single storage utility through the use of Compaq's software. The SAN market right now has all the characteristics of an early-stage game, similar to the salad days of the PC or networking industries, noted Merrill Lynch's McKinley. Vendors are competing ''to own me and I don't want to be owned,'' he said. He sees two more years of relative chaos followed by consolidation and agreement. Or as HP's Denzel put it, ''If this were a baseball game, we'd be in the second inning.'' searchstorage.techtarget.com

To: DownSouth who wrote (6097)	2/5/2001 2:35:07 PM
From: riposte	Respond to of 10934

Article Title: Executive vision: Storage takes top priority at HP Source: searchStorage.com URL: searchstorage.techtarget.com. Date: 02 Feb 2001 Editor's Summary: In another in a series of interviews with the top executives of major storage companies attending the Merrill Lynch Storage Technology Conference in Santa Barbara this week, searchStorage speaks to Nora Denzel, vice president and general manager of Hewlett-Packard's Network Storage Solutions Organization, about the prominent role that storage has taken in HP's reinvention.

To: DownSouth who wrote (6097)	2/5/2001 9:35:34 PM
From: Uncle Frank	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 10934

With all the talk of dot-bombs and reduced IT budgets causing analysts to downgrade ntap, Dataquest has just come out with a report on 4Q server sales that implies growth of the internet hasn't slowed. Coupling this with EMC's anecdotal evidence that network memory is not a discretionary item gives me hope that ntap (and cisco for that matter) might surprise Mr. Market when they report. biz.yahoo.com Monday February 5, 4:57 pm Eastern Time Fourth-quarter server computer sales strong-Dataquest By Nicole Volpe NEW YORK, Feb 5 (Reuters) - Fourth-quarter sales of the powerful computers that are the backbone of the Web were strong in the fourth quarter, even as the tech sector slumped and many Internet companies collapsed, according to preliminary data from a top market research firm. Worldwide, sales of servers -- the ``back office'' computers that run networks of other computers -- grew 21 percent from the fourth quarter of 1999 with a total of 1.1 million units shipped, Dataquest, a unit of Gartner Group, said in a statement. ``Despite concerns that the U.S. economic slowdown may have on the server industry, the U.S. server market performed quite well in the fourth quarter of 2000,'' the report said. The strong fourth-quarter growth pushed 2000 server shipments to 3.9 million units, an increase of 14 percent over 1999, Dataquest said. Sun Microsystems Inc. (NasdaqNM:SUNW - news) and Dell Computer Corp. (NasdaqNM:DELL - news) showed the strongest unit increases among the top-tier vendors in 2000, with growth rates of 61 and 42 percent, respectively. And for the first time, Compaq Computer Corp. (NYSE:CPQ - news) surpassed the one million mark in annual unit shipments, Dataquest said. That allowed Compaq to retain the No. 1 market share position on a units-shipped basis. Compaq has 27 percent of the server market, down from 28 percent last year. It is followed by International Business Machines Corp. (NYSE:IBM - news), which has 16.7 percent of the server market, also off somewhat from its market share of 17.3 percent last year. Compaq and IBM both grew at a rate of nearly 11 percent over the year before, Dataquest said. Faster-growing rivals Dell and Sun both made market share gains. Dell now has about 14.6 percent of the server market on a units shipped basis, compared with 11.7 percent. Sun has 7.3 percent, up from 5.2 percent for 1999. Hewlett-Packard Co. (NYSE:HWP - news) showed only 4.2 percent growth, with its market share falling to 11.2 percent from 12.3 percent.