My brother-in-law (a Republican politician here in Phoenix) just got a cool new gadget. It's a box slightly larger than cigarette box, which hooks up to his laptop, which contains a wireless modem. I can't remember the name of the wireless company - but they installed relays every couple of miles throughout Phoenix. It operates at two to three times the speed of a 56K - which is the fastest wireless connection I've seen yet. You can get a PCMCIA but it's a hundred bucks more.
Dave,
Maybe its made by this company:
The BlueArc Shark
By Don Luskin
Special to TheStreet.com
3/27/01 6:05 PM ET
While I've been stuck here on the trading desk, my partner Dave Nadig has been in Scottsdale, Ariz., at PC Forum, an exclusive gathering of the digital elite sponsored for 24 years by guru-ess Esther Dyson. Twenty-four years ... hard to remember what it was like back then, when the personal computer was a radical change-the-world technology.
Dave is reporting from Scottsdale about a new private company with its own radical technology -- BlueArc. Because it's still private, you can't invest in it directly.
But it sounds like you may even want to sell or short some of BlueArc's competitors. BlueArc is a nuclear-tipped cruise missile aimed straight at storage giants like EMC (EMC:NYSE) and Network Appliance (NTAP:Nasdaq) .
On Monday, I received these bulletins from Dave, sent live from PC Forum on his wireless BlackBerry pager, saying:
This is about the most stunning presentation I have ever been to.
Their presentation is packed, and as the guy next to me is saying, "So basically, they are selling crack to IT guys, cheap."
They have 20 units out in beta now, with official sales starting in about four weeks. Most beta testers have indicated they want to buy the units. They are going out price point for price point with Network Appliance, with 10 times the performance (being verified by ZD Labs).
Unless they screw something up, they will have Network Appliance out of business -- within three years is my bet.
This wasn't the first time I'd heard how wonderful -- and how potentially dangerous -- BlueArc might be. George Gilder reported on it in the February issue of Gilder Technology Report, writing "BlueArc imperils all the software-based network storage appliances, whether it be from Network Appliance, EMC, Hewlett-Packard (HWP:NYSE) , Procom (PRCM:Nasdaq) or Compaq (CPQ:NYSE) ." But who believes George Gilder anymore? He never met a technology that wasn't going to take over this or destroy that.
But after BlueArc's PC Forum presentation, Nadig spent quality time with Geoff Barrall, BlueArc's chief technology officer. And Nadig came away believing that, thanks to BlueArc, Network Appliance and EMC really are toast.
Like all great technology visions, Barrall's seems simple in retrospect. He recognized the key bottleneck in network storage -- the data servers that stand between the disk drives with the data on them and the high-speed networks that demand the data stored in them. The backplane with the disk drives (often a fiber-channel-based storage area network) and the data networks both run at up to 2 gigabits a second, but the servers in the middle max out at a paltry 400 megabits.
Why? Because these servers are basically souped-up PCs that use traditional PC architecture, requiring that data from the disk or storage area network be put into memory and then pulled back out of memory before it can be served to the network.
Barrall decided to start from scratch, asking himself, "Hey, what if you just designed hardware from the ground up that was designed just to move data around?"
And that's pretty much what he and the engineers at BlueArc did. But rather than get into the hardware business in a big way, BlueArc opted to use field-programmable chips from Altera (ALTR:Nasdaq) . They're cheap, and can be upgraded -- so BlueArc can waste them to make the ultimate storage server.
Need to talk Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol with the network? Grab a chip and program TCP/IP into it. Need to talk fiber channel to the disk drives? Grab another chip. Need to speak to a Windows NT file system? You get the idea. At every point in the process of moving data where an action is required, you'll find a chip.
The end result? BlueArc calls it SiliconServer Architecture, and it debuts in its Si7500 box: a file server that is five to 10 times faster than the fastest competitive machine from EMC or Network Appliance, a machine that can take 100 times as many user connections and handle 30 times as much storage, all because it is designed to do one thing, and one thing only.
And of course, BlueArc is delivering all this right at Network Appliance's price point, which is already cheaper than EMC's in most cases. And, yes, BlueArc has a hefty patent portfolio.
And what can we, the lowly stock investor, do? Nothing. The company is private. We can avoid buying Network Appliance and EMC, I suppose, or we can short them.
We can (and we do!) own Altera as a downstream beneficiary (or Veritas (VRTS:Nasdaq) , too, with whom BlueArc has compatibility). We could look at Emulex (EMLX:Nasdaq) on a whim, which makes the fiber-channel hubs BlueArc expects most of its clients to use. Super high-end systems will be delivered with Brocade (BRCD:Nasdaq) hubs, Barrall grudgingly admitted, with some not-good-for-Brocade-shareholders body language thrown in.
All the storage stocks have already been completely bloodied. But then so have all networking stocks, and network storage remains one of the fastest-growing and least-understood elements in the networking world. So it's a shame there isn't more to be done about BlueArc, except just not to bet against it.
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Don Luskin is president and CEO of MetaMarkets.com and a portfolio manager of OpenFund. At time of publication, OpenFund was long Altera, although holdings can change at any time. Luskin appreciates your feedback and invites you to send it to Don Luskin. |
