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

To: Bill Fischofer who wrote (13244)	9/25/2001 10:32:10 AM
From: jhg_in_kc	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 17183

could you elaboarate on your thoughts onthe dell/emc alliance, jparticularly ("This will have as profound an impact on the IT landscape as the introduction of RAID technology a decade ago.") I am a little rusty on what RAID means. thanks jhg

To: Bill Fischofer who wrote (13244)	9/26/2001 2:40:49 AM
From: Gus	Respond to of 17183

A lot will depend on Dell. If it is content with a garden variety reseller arrangement then I don't think it will be maximizing the relationship. Typical reseller margins are only 15%-20%, well within the range of Dell's current gross margins of 15%-18%. That would pit Dell directly against some of EMC's dedicated storage resellers who are slowly but surely mirroring EMC's ability to support any server, any network and prospectively, any storage system. If Dell decides to use the initial reseller agreement as a platform for more joint product development then you have a potentially long-lasting alliance where both parties benefit commensurately over a long period of time. This is the lay of the land, as EMC sees it today. Most of EMC's R&D dollars are focused on server-based logic that complements the fabric-based logic and array-based logic that EMC has developed over the last 5 years. If Dell looks hard enough, there are still plenty of missing pieces -- particularly in the system management space around the client-server architecture -- that represents a higher margin opportunity for Dell. NETWORK STORAGE: The New Storage Landscape - Part 1 Building Information Power Plants By Jim Rothnie, Ph.D ....One of the facets of high functionality that I want to discuss with you here for a moment, is where does the intelligence belong in a modern storage deployment, the type that all of our customers are heading to today? The various resources involved with accessing information are organized, somewhat simplistically, in the three layers that are shown here. 1) Servers, which are running the applications, 2) a connectivity layer, which connects the servers to the information, 3) then the storage system itself, which is storing that data. Functionality can be put in any of those three places, but for each particular function, it turns out that there is a best place to put it. And if you put that function somewhere else, it can cost you an order of magnitude in performance, and often really spells the difference between being able to do it at all, and being able to do it effectively. Storage optimization is actually an excellent example of this, because optimization involves moving data from one part of the storage system to another. That really belongs in the storage system. If you don't put it there, for example, if you put that software up in the application server, it costs an enormously larger amount to perform these optimization functions. The data has to travel all the way up, across the connectivity layer, into the servers, and back down to accomplish that data moving function. Data replication and remote mirroring are other examples of functions which involve data movement and are performed much more effectively in the storage layer than anywhere else. And another place that functionality can be placed, is in the server complex itself. And again, there are certain functions which belong there. This chart illustrates one, called path failover, which involves controlling the channels which come out from the servers and down into the storage complex. Controlling them when a failure occurs or to balance the load across them, must be performed inside the server, so that's the right place to put it. What you find in the storage market today is that vendors who have products in one particular layer try to put all the value-add there. I can say in practice, I think of it as "Commoditize thy neighbor." The effort to move value into the part of the complex where you have the strongest position. Certainly we see storage software suppliers who try to put it all in the server layer. We see suppliers of things like SAN appliances, they try to put it all in the connectivity layer, and back in the old days, when EMC had a narrower scope of interest, we thought it all belongs in the storage system itself. But as our scope of understand of the whole storage environment matured, and through discussions with customers, and a clear understanding of what they required, we have come to understand that the right thing to do is to put functions where they belong. And as a rule of thumb, it's putting that intelligence close to the thing that the intelligence is controlling. And you get implementations of advanced functionality which are far superior to any other approach. So distributed intelligence is really the answer to handling advanced functions effectively. wwpi.com