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

To: hlpinout who wrote (95665)	3/4/2002 6:22:48 PM
From: hlpinout	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 97611

How Storage Became the Center of the Universe By Sonia R. Lelii VARBusiness - 3:51 PM EST Mon., Mar. 04, 2002 During one of my earliest interviews on the storage beat, a storage company CEO said this to me: "We used to stand around the coffee machine and figure out ways to get out of storage. Now, we are the center of the universe." I have waited a long time to get that quote in a story. Here is my chance; never has it been more appropriate. The typically small--and somewhat closed--world of storage vendors and managers is seeing a surge of newcomers. It is safe to say the number of startups cropping up in this space is a jaw-dropper. Analyst Robert Gray of International Data Corp. has spent the past year tracking the numbers. When I interviewed him last March, he had tallied about 50 companies. When I interviewed him in January, that number shot up to about 150. But other anecdotes have surfaced from my daily conversations with CEOs and public relations people. Just last week, startup InterSAN CEO Chris Melville recounted the unexpected ease he is having in getting an audience with the venture capital community. "Usually it is very difficult," Melville says. "[But now] nobody ever turns me down. Storage is sexy all of a sudden." A representative at Trainer Public Relations says the company just signed on six new clients, three of them storage-based. When I started covering storage three years ago, one of the least difficult parts of the beat was trying to remember the number of players in the space --there weren't many and they were all big names. Now, there are Maranti Networks, Pirus Networks, Storigen Systems, Z-force Communications, BluArc, Nishan Systems, Cereva Networks and Datacore Software. Those are just a handful using their venture capital money to develop products in areas like network-attached storage, storage-area networks, IP storage and the newest and most popular of the lot--storage-area management (SAM). What does all this mean? Besides the obvious (competition breeds innovation), it can either bring clarification or confusion to an industry not known for getting along. It will be interesting to see if and how all these newcomers will influence the dynamics among the storage heavyweights--like EMC and Compaq Computer. A case in point is how the SAM market is shaping up. Companies like EMC and Compaq and Hitachi Data Systems have been sharing their APIs with ISVs for years now. But the situation becomes a little dicey when it comes to sharing their APIs with each other. Compaq and EMC have entered into an API cross-license agreement, but Compaq has made it clear it does not share EMC's vision to build its middleware WideSky management software. There is a lot of distrust among the veteran vendors that EMC is building a proprietary middleware under the guise of open-management software. These companies need to take a lesson from the Fibre Channel industry: while everyone was squabbling about standards, the networking community joined the market with a new technology: IP storage. The same could happen with management software. While the veteran vendors are grinding their axes, newcomers like InterSAN and TrueSAN Networks are happily trotting to customers and saying, "Hey, we don't care what hardware you operate on, want to buy some software to manage it?"

To: hlpinout who wrote (95665)	3/4/2002 6:51:22 PM
From: hlpinout	Respond to of 97611

Charts at the link. -- Alpha-Itanium CPUs collide S'wonderful, S'marvellous... By Mike Magee, 04/03/2002 09:28:06 BST THE LATEST COMPAQ roadmap we've seen for the Alpha contrasts its performance with Intel's Itanium, and the latter is still lagging in performance terms. Compaq - when it was still talking to us - told us of the upgrade to the Alpha technology but its EV7 technology, expected to be released in April, looks like it will still whop just about every other competitor in the face with its performance characteristics. The EV7 will clock at speeds of around 1.2GHz, use 155W, and have a die size of 400 square millimeters on a .18 micron process, and with 1443 pins, compared to the 675 pins of EV68C. And around this time next year, the EV79 will clock at around 1.7GHz, will be made using 130 nanometer technology and silicon on insulator, with a die size of 300 square millimeters and using power of 120W. It tapes out in the the first quarter of next year for release in the first half of 2004, perilously close to the date the Itanic and the Alpha technology are supposed to become one. That's an awful long time for a shrink, isn't it? What's the story there? EV7 (Alpha 21364) has integrated level two cache, an integrated memory controller and an integrated network interface, with support for a lock step operation for high availability systems. Marvellous. The chip will be a seven layer baby, with 152 million transistors, 15 million of which are logic chip and 137 million of which will be SRAM. It can address an interesting 4TB of memory, with virtual page sizes of 64K, 2MB, 64MB and 512MB. The L2 cache on the die is seven way set associative with ECC, has 20GB/s read/write bandwidth, and 16 victim buffers for L1 to L2, and 16 victim buffers for L2 to memory. As we've pointed out before, the two memory controllers are Rambus based and directly connect to the processor. The integrated network interface has direct processor-to-processor interconnect, with four links, each being 6.4GN/s. with 18 nanoseconds processor to processor latency, creating an out of order network with adaptive routing, and having asynchronous clocking between processors, and with a 3GB/s IP interface per processor. Here's a diagram of the memory bandwidth, comparing it to other processors. And here's another which shows estimated SPEC200 1-CPU peak for the 1.2GHz Marvel agin the opposition. Of course the Itanium and the Alpha are not now in opposition, but you know what we mean. Moles at the Intel Developer Conference in SF last week whispered to us that if La thinks she can use all the hyperthreading the Alpha boys have as soon as it expects for its IA-32 families like Prescott, she can probably think again. µ theinquirer.net