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Technology Stocks : Son of SAN - Storage Networking Technologies -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: George Dawson who wrote (3212)	5/3/2001 6:12:40 PM
From: J Fieb	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 4808

George, Would appreciate your opinion on this curve ball. Thanks in advance... Sun is in talks for Hitachi storage Source: the451 Date: 03 May 2001 Hitachi Data Systems and Sun are cooking up a deal on storage, the net of which would be that Sun resells Hitachi's high-end array technology in some shape or form. The deal is not done yet, but "we are talking," HDS COO David Roberson told the451. There's a head of steam already building around speculation about such a deal. "Where there's smoke there's fire," said Roberson, calling another OEM deal this year for Hitachi's Lightning storage array "probable." Sun is under increasing pressure to put in place a storage strategy that works and has a high-end element to it. Mark Canepa, Sun's new storage chief, didn't rule out partnering with Hitachi when asked about the company's plans last week. The competition isn't sweating, however. The only comment on such a deal from EMC chief technical officer Jim Rothnie was, "Just look at [what happened to] our Hewlett-Packard deal," referring to the acrimonious unraveling of EMC's reseller relationship with HP. HP is now Hitachi's most important OEM. If the deal comes off, it will be interesting to see how Sun is able to differentiate the HDS technology from the version of the Lightning array that HP sells under its brand. HDS's storage business, now limbering up to become a separate company, wants 50% of its business to come from indirect sales within two years, compared with 30% now (although that excludes the HP relationship). HDS expects to do $400-500 million in revenue in its first quarter, which began in April. That is less than it did in the previous quarter but more than the $250m it did in the same period last year. It does 20% of its business in the S/390 mainframe market. HDS's storage unit is the fastest-growing piece of Hitachi Ltd's business, and Roberson said he expects profits to grow significantly. Roberson said HDS is now pulling out all the stops to win the race to provide users with storage virtualization software, which lets them not only see but also manage different vendors' equipment on one storage area network. The software will also enable companies to keep fewer copies of files than they currently do across different networks and systems, Roberson said. It's at least 18 months out, he forecasts. The three-pronged approach combines the company's own development with work from software partner Veritas, plus additional technology it will get by partnering with or acquiring any of the half-dozen of so storage software startups that it's currently evaluating. At $0.15-0.20 per megabyte, HDS's storage is less expensive than EMC's, but more costly than IBM's. HDS estimates two-thirds of its subsystems now ship with additional SAN equipment attached to them, such as Brocade switches. Hmmm. I guess Purple2 can't be that good? Any thoughts out there? Anyone going to buy HDS on the IPO?

To: George Dawson who wrote (3212)	5/31/2001 7:14:32 AM
From: J Fieb	Respond to of 4808

More proteomic data.... IBM, MDS team up on free biotech research database By Ian Karleff TORONTO, May 30 (Reuters) - International Business Machines Corp. (NYSE:IBM - news) and Canada's MDS Proteomics (Toronto:MDS.TO - news) said on Wednesday they had created a public database of proteomics research aimed at taming the massive amount of data needed to discover how proteins cause disease. ADVERTISEMENT The new database was created in conjunction with government agencies from North America and Europe. It will provide researchers with a free, centralized repository of proteomics research, outside the growing number of fee-for-service databases operated by the private sector, such as Celera Genomics Group (NYSE:CRA - news) and Myriad Genetics Inc. (NasdaqNM:MYGN - news) -- backed by Hitachi Ltd. and Oracle Corp. (NasdaqNM:ORCL - news). Proteomics is the study of the complex interactions between proteins in a cell and how these chemical reactions form healthy or diseased cells. It has become a major area of focus since last summer's mapping of the human genome. ``We are still at the very early stages of a profound health revolution that started with genomics and now proteomics. We will soon face a coherent and intellectually satisfying look at the determinants of human health,'' said Alan Bernstein, president of the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, and sponsor of the public database. As researchers around the world work feverishly to understand how proteins interact, reams of data are being produced in varying formats and stored on unconnected databases. It is hoped the Biomolecular Interaction Network Database (BIND), that will be managed by a non-profit company called BluePrint Worldwide Inc., will give researchers a central point of access to the growing volumes of data. ``The biggest problem for the life sciences industry right now is the volume and pace of data being generated. We are drowning in data,'' said IBM's vice-president of life sciences Caroline Kovac. BACKING FROM PUBLIC AGENCIES Financial backing for the public database is coming from IBM and MDS Proteomics, a division of Canadian life sciences firm MDS Inc., as well as the National Center for Biotechnology Information, the European BioInformatics Institute, the Canadian Institutes of Health Research and the Samuel Lunenfeld Research Institute. ``Without government support, people would have to pay. Furthermore, this database boasts two other ingredients: critical mass and accessibility,'' said BluePrint managing director Francis Ouellette. Kovac said there are currently over 1,000 public data sources and more than a hundred times that many inside the walls of companies around the world, with much of the data residing in incompatible formats. BIND will annotate over 50 years of literature, which includes about 200,000 scientific papers, and will build on the National Center for Biotechnology Information's GenBank. Ouellette said that while information found in the publicly accessible GenBank are necessary ingredients, BluePrint will provide the recipe to give the ingredients a role in curing disease. An huge amount of computing power is required to crunch proteomics data, as evidenced by the fact that the world's largest commercially operated super-computer is now owned by a biotechnology firm, said IBM's Kovac. ``Biology is driving super-computing like it never did before. Physics always used to be the big driver, but that is not true any more. We started to see that at the beginning of 2000,'' she added. NuTec, which has inked a partnership arrangement with IBM Life Sciences, operates a super-computer that runs at speeds of 7.5 teraflops -- with one teraflop capable of processing one trillion operations per second. ``If you turn the computers off. You couldn't do any of this stuff,'' added Kovacs. Shares of IBM closed down $2.71 at $112.56 on the New York Stock Exchange in a weak market for technology shares, with the Nasdaq composite Index off 4.4 percent. Shares of MDS dipped 15 Canadian cents to C$22.60 on the Toronto Stock Exchange. ($1 equals $1.54 Canadian)