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

To: Proud_Infidel who wrote (13319)	10/15/2001 12:16:20 PM
From: JDN	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 17183

Did ya HAVE to rub it in?? JDN

To: Proud_Infidel who wrote (13319)	10/16/2001 5:37:57 AM
From: Gus	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 17183

Big Blurb caught red-handed in clumsy FUD campaign before reporting earnings!!! I believe this officially disqualifies Big Blue from winning the Miss Congeniality award of this year's storage industry beauty contest.<g> Wal-Mart taps IBM for mainframe/storage project By LUCAS MEARIAN (October 15, 2001) Wal-Mart Stores Inc. has rolled out a multimillion-dollar mainframe consolidation and storage expansion project using IBM systems that analysts say is a boon in Big Blue's struggle against storage market leader EMC Corp. and others. The project, which industry experts estimate will cost $30 million to $50 million, uses IBM's newest z900 mainframes to replace an existing IBM S390 architecture related to Wal-Mart's core business systems, which deals with the creation of invoices, items and payrolls. The Bentonville, Ark.-based retail giant installed an IBM Shark server with 50TB of data storage capacity. *Wal-Mart spokesman Tom Williams said the company "hasn't named any suppliers [it's] replacing."* "We've had a storage area network [SAN]. This just upgrades and consolidates it considerably," he said of the project. Even so, an IBM spokesman, Glenn Hintz, said IBM replaced EMC and Hitachi in the central data center operations. The announcement comes at a time of extraordinarily fierce competition between IBM and storage competitors EMC, Hitachi Data Systems Corp. and Sun Microsystems Inc. It is also a turnaround of sorts for IBM's Shark Enterprise Storage Server, which until recently had performance problems, analysts said. IBM touted the deal in an announcement on its Web site. Wal-Mart's worldwide data center serves more than 4,000 Wal-Mart stores, including Supercenters and Sam's Clubs. EMC spokesman Greg Eaton said Wal-Mart is still a big user of the Hopkinton, Mass storage vendor's Symmetrix, Clariion and Celera storage systems for its SAN. And in a statement, an EMC spokeswoman said: "IBM storage is only used for applications directly attached to IBM mainframes. In contrast, Wal-Mart has deployed EMC across multiple server platforms, including UNIX and NT, using a networked storage infrastructure comprising both SAN and NAS technology and supported by EMC's entire suite of information storage and management software." Arun Taneja, an analyst at The Enterprise Storage Group Inc. in Milford, Mass., said the win for IBM is indicative of a turnaround for its Shark server. "Early information we were getting from the field was that Shark's performance was horrible and it couldn't grow capacity beyond a certain point," he said. Those problems have apparently been ironed out, Taneja said. "The IBM Shark and eServer z900 have given us a significant improvement in our processing time, in some cases allowing us to cut our processing time for some jobs by more than half," said Dan Phillips, vice president of technology support and operations at Wal-Mart. Mike Kahn, chairman of The Clipper Group Inc. in Wellesley, Mass., said the Wal-Mart contract significantly turns up the heat on storage market leader EMC. "Pricing has got to be an issue. Whenever you're spending this much money, you're always looking for the best price available," Kahn said. "IBM and Hitachi in particular are fighting back very hard," Taneja said. "Our information is that EMC is selling products at a price-per-gigabyte rate that is almost unheard of for the class of systems they are." Sun announced today that it too had landed a big contract with a retailer, Ross Stores Inc. The Newark, Calif.-based company, which has 438 retail stores, will use Sun Fire 6800 servers to manage corporate accounts, supplies and human resources. computerworld.com