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

To: DownSouth who wrote (7565)	4/6/2001 5:26:48 PM
From: nnillionaire	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 10934

DS A thoughtful post from TMF: boards.fool.com For many weeks now we have all (EMC and NetApps readers in particular) been inundated with the “promise” of BlueArc and it's phenomenal performance capabilities. Today I had a look at the specs that have been posted on the BlueArc home page. At a quick glance it is highly unlikely that this product will break any performance barriers, and in fact has the potential to be slower than many products already on the market. Lat me explain …… If you read the BlueArc claims of performance breakthroughs carefully they are always referring to the controller element, they rarely if ever make mention of the back end disks. And at the end of the day the customers data is stored on the disks. Customers are worried about the performance of the whole subsystem, not just one element of it. High performance storage systems get their performance edge by holding as much data in cache as possible so that read operations come from the cache and don't have to go to the “slow” disks. In many respects the bigger the cache the better (together with having good cache algorithms and data management). BlueArc claim they can support up to 250 TB, but their maximum cache size is stated as 7GB. This is a very poor ratio. This means that they will have to do more real, physical i/o's than other vendors. Any performance advantage they may (or may not) have at the controller level will be more than offset by the fact that they have to do more real i/o operations than other vendors. Their controller may be fast, but it is only one part of a storage subsystem. ................................................. Good Investing nn