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Technology Stocks : EMC How high can it go? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: pirate_200 who wrote (12190)	2/14/2001 4:55:09 PM
From: Gus	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 17183

You are one weird dude. Persistent, but weird. First you barge into here, accusing me of repeating EMC Marketing and then you keep on trying to change the topic every time I use facts to expose your shallow arguments. Have you already forgotten how I exposed your pathetic inability to read a balance sheet and forced you to parrot NTAP's excuses for the fact that receivables have grown faster than sales in each of the last 3 quarters despite their claims to the lack of competition? LOL. Now you apparently want more punishment. Here goes. RAID is turned OFF* so there is no parity-protection for disk data - disk dies, data dies.* You're like putty in my hands. I've deliberately allowed you to repeat yourself 4 or 5 times on this RAID ON and RAID OFF issue so that there can be no ambiguity about the fact that you are lazy and stupid. Striping and Mirroring are data management schemes that pre-dated the 1988 Berkeley papers which laid the foundation for parity-based RAID. In the classification scheme subsequently developed by the RAB (RAID Advisory Board), striping without any redundancy became RAID 0 and mirroring with 100% redundancy became RAID 1 so your persistent claim that RAID 0 is not RAID is just plain wrong. Other parity-based levels were subsequently developed with some vendors like EMC developing their own versions of parity-based RAID. EMC's RAID S, for example, depends on the microprocessors inside the disk drives for parity calculation and was certified as compatible with RAID 3, 4, and 5 in 1996. Each RAID level involves trade-offs which is why only the most gullible investors fall for the marketing sleight-of-hand used by less than scrupulous vendors that one RAID level is better than the other. For example, RAID 1 involves 100% redundancy and provides maximum protection. The trade-off is that it requires twice the number of disk drives as any other RAID level. Any of the parity-based RAID levels (3,4,5,6,7,10,54,etc) do not provide the same type of protection as RAID 1, but provide different ways to optimize the read and/or write processes for different types of applications with less than 100% redundancy and protection. EMC broke IBM's stanglehold of the mainframe storage market with a RAID 1 box in 1990 and then it broke new ground a few years later with a box that supported multiple RAID levels. As a result, most RAID vendors today support multiple RAID levels, typically RAID 0, 1 and one of the parity-based implementations. RAID 0 is the best RAID level to use for multimedia applications that require maximum bandwidth so your statement that RAID 0 represents turning off parity-based RAID is incoherent because those multiple RAID levels require physical partitioning of the disk arrays which typically take place during the final assembly process. You keep ignoring the basic question, everyone else benchmarks with RAID ON, they do this because customers generally buy systems that way No, customers do not buy systems according to one-dimensional benchmarks because they understand that each RAID level involves trade-offs in terms of speed and protection and they specify how their disk arrays are configured with different RAID levels. If anything, customers use the higher classification schemes of the RAID Advisory Board in their procurement decisions. You see, because many one-dimensional RAID vendors were misrepresenting the different RAID levels for marketing purposes, RAB decided to implement a new classification scheme with more stringent requirements on top of the originial RAID classification scheme in 1997. raid-advisory.com EMC was the first vendor to qualify under this revised classification scheme in 1997. To date, NTAP claims to be for open standards and wants to move up the food chain into the enterprise but they still haven't qualified. If anyone is backpedaling, it's EMC, they have been saying for years that NTAP is wrong, SAN is better than NAS, yet comes out with a NAS product. Isn't that contradictory? Again, you just keep on going from one emotional argument to another. In the process, you just reveal how little you know and how unwilling you are even to do a little research. The undeniable fact of the matter is that Celerra, a SAN/NAS hybrid, has gone from $7M in sales in 1Q1998 to $210M in sales in 4Q2000. How can you then you say with a straight face that EMC has been claiming for years that SAN is better than NAS? The fact of the matter is that SAN is ideal for many applications and NAS is ideal for some applications. Why do you think that the SAN market is already much bigger and growing much faster than the NAS market despite the fact that NAS was invented more than 15 years ago by Sun? Below is a timeline of EMC's NAS development efforts that should belie any more attempts on your part to revise history to suit your childish partisan needs. emc.com Now if you know how to think for yourself, you would understand why it's important to correlate the progress of the NAS market with the evolution of corporate networks from 10 Mbps to 100 Mbps to 1 Gbps. NETWORK Attached Storage, duh! The fact alone that it took the NAS more than 15 years to develop into a $1B market in 2000 should tell you how those things sell. Unfortunately, you've brainwashed yourself into thinking that the barriers to NTAP's business are so high that nobody can catch up that you're obviously in a mild state of shock and disbelief that EMC will overtake NTAP soon in the NAS space. Too bad, but the numbers don't lie. Get used to it, though. All EMC has to do is sell to its large and diverse installed base and it will become the top NAS vendor and get on with the larger opportunity involved in combining SAN and NAS technology, which it has been doing for the last 5 years. Lastly, grow up and stop wasting our time!