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

To: Tony Viola who wrote (12557)	4/3/2001 11:26:30 AM
From: JDN	Respond to of 17183

Dear Tony: So what are you doing in this market? I am still buying on major dips, in fact just put a low ball order in on EMC this morning. Only problem I got is the dips keep getting BIGGER. haha. I figure this is a temp. situation caused by an almost complete halt on capital expenditures in the tech area. That cannot last, eventually the dam has got to break, might take 2 years but its gotta happen and huge gains from these levels are in the works. JDN

To: Tony Viola who wrote (12557)	4/5/2001 7:42:56 PM
From: Gus	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 17183

I agree that server blades, which fit into the overall new server architecture of modular design, are the future. Also Infiniband. But, what do these necessarily have to do with Blue Arc? Infiniband enables a switched fabric system area network (S.A.N.) that effectively serves as a dynamic pool of processing power that can be allocated optimally according to different applications including serving files. That's similar to the way that Fibre Channel enables a switched fabric storage area network (SAN) that serves as a dynamic pool of storage that can be allocated optimally according to applications. This shouldn't be surprising since Fibre Channel SANs are expected to integrated seamlessly with Infiniband server clusters as Infiniband technology stabilizes. As you know, SANs are currently used for block level storage traffic. Both IBM and EMC, however, are engaged in a high stakes race to develop a distributed SAN file system that will allow block level and file level transfers on the SAN. IBM acquired SANenergy (distributed file system) from Mercury in late 1999 and its Tivoli subsidiary is now trying to integrate it into its StorageTank initiative. EMC acquired CrosStor last year primarily for its distributed SAN file system and I think they're going to integrate it into their next generation SAN offerings. Considering the kind of additional logic that this seem to require, I'm not too sure that FPGAs, at the current process geometries, have enough horsepower to accomodate EMC's performance budgets under their centralized management/distributed intelligence highly parallel system design framework. In other words, despite the novel implementation of FPGAs in its NAS gateway, Blue Arc's solution may be a case of too little too late because the market is going to change once IBM and EMC introduce their competing SAN file systems, which again, will integrate seamlessly with Infiniband server clusters. Keep in mind that as storage takes up most of the IT budget in the years ahead, the server vendors are expected to use many hooks including clustering services to preserve the server-storage lock-in that accounts for the fact that 7 out of 10 RAID arrays are still sold by the server vendor. Sun, for example, will not warranty its server if the customer opts to buy storage from another vendor. Loyal Sun customers, however, have learned that Sun can be bullied into modifying their service level agreements so as to accomodate their preference for buying more scalable storage systems from a vendor like EMC, which according to Gartner, currently captures about 90% of the storage systems that sell with Sun's most expensive servers. That win rate, by the way, is way up from the 50% success rate that EMC had with Starfire in 1998.<g>