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

To: Douglas Nordgren who wrote (3751)	8/3/2001 3:13:33 PM
From: Gus	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 4808

EMC lays down some markers: ......Technology leaders like EMC can make the difficult look easy. That phenomenon gives rise to elaborate "me-tooism" among competitors who think they, too, can do it just as well. Four of their myths collapsed under the scrutiny of Donatelli's microscope: "Hardware is a commodity." Donatelli argued that commoditization happens when the only way to differentiate is through price. EMC's information storage hardware remains sharply differentiated with a unique and scalable architecture and a feature-rich, robust operating environment. Symmetrix is rated at 233 MIPS. Clariion is rated at 733 MIPS. EMC currently has the following storage operating systems that serve as the foundation for their newest initiative: 1) Enguinity Operating System (Symmetrix) - cache management, data placement, parallel processing, load-balancing, remote diagnostics. Among other things, Enguinity allows EMC to put a dedicated service processor in Symmetrix that runs more than 1000 diagnostic routines every 2 hours strictly in background mode. These diagnostics allow EMC to capture 9 out over 10 failures before they happen and partly explain why more than 90% of its customers extend their service contracts after the standard 2-year warranty. 2) Crosstor Operating System (Clariion) - scaled-down version of Enguinity tuned for very inefficient distributed systems. Symmetrix uses microcodes or system-level software more extensively than Clariion which appears to be designed to accomodate more software layer processing. Symmetrix is dominant in carefully structured data-center environments typically anchored by expensive mainframes and high-end Unix servers running very expensive applications. Clariion is being positioned for the jungle of less structured distributed systems or networked systems that typically suffer from multiple weak links in a chain. 3) Celerra - SCO Unix-based and Linux-based Control Station (cluster management OS) and DART (embedded file system). 4) Avalon file system - broadcasting and post-production management system already shipping. Japan is positioning to move to HDTV in 2003 while the USA and Northern Europe are looking at 2005-2006 to make the transition. 5) Filepool - peer-to-peer internet file system. "You only need software." This simply won't work: When software works with inferior hardware it can't see data, it can't manage or manipulate it. And why replicate the functionality of the storage hardware and operating environment and waste the processing power of the server? For superior results, hardware and software must work in unison. This one is aimed at those who frequently indulge in deconstruction for deconstruction's sake, a process which often produces theoretically neat technical solutions in search of business problems. In particular, this one addresses the view put forward by some analysts that EMC should get out of the hardware business and focus on software in order to swap competitive advantages for nicer spreadsheets. "Control is moving to the middle." Some vendors argue that storage switches are where the intelligence should reside, making both the server and the storage system irrelevant. But this tactic presents an engineering nightmare and defeats the concept of Distributed Intelligence: putting intelligence where it makes most sense, as close as possible to the specific operation the intelligence controls. This one seemed aimed at Toigo and Brocade which put forth the propositon that more intelligent switches will allow the use of more JBODs. What happens when you put too much intelligence in the switches? You turn a specialized computer (switch) into a general purprose computer and defeat the purpose of decoupling the switch function (route data) from the servers or storage systems. "Building it yourself is better." This most pervasive myth of all neglects the real financial costs tied to building information infrastructures: Finding skilled staff, performing integration testing, developing software and more—all leading to wasted time and, ultimately, sub-optimal results. As Donatelli said, "This method puts the entire burden on customers. Then it leaves them with lower functionality and a higher total cost of ownership." emc.com