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

To: Elmer Flugum who wrote (14270)	5/28/2002 4:38:43 PM
From: Gus	Respond to of 17183

1) Next gen Symms and Clariions. Notable excerpts: The forthcoming update to Symmetrix, Version 6.0, is due early next year and will be the product's first major update in 12 years. The most notable change to the system will be its use of a Fibre Channel internal architecture instead of its current SCSI design, sources said. The design change, however, will not affect user interactions with the microcode—rather the way Symmetrix's cache, disk drives, host interfaces and processors communicate internally, sources said. But moving to Fibre Channel will also help the Hopkinton, Mass., company greatly reduce production costs, as a similar design is already used in EMC's midrange Clariion products. What users will see are faster bandwidth, larger caches and faster processors, the sources said. For example, it is expected to scale to at least 144 terabytes and feature 10GB-to-15GB-per-second bandwidth, sources said. Such performance would equal Tokyo-based Hitachi's recent announcement of its 9980 system, which is due later this year.......... On the Clariion front, EMC is evolving its reseller agreement with Dell Computer Corp., according to Russ Holt, vice president and general manager of storage systems and servers for the Round Rock, Texas, computer maker. Dell currently resells the Clariion FC4700-2, FC4500 and FC5300 systems, as well as the IP4700 NAS version. This fall, EMC will give the FC4500 density improvements and 2G-bps support. Dell will manufacture that, said Holt, who added that the company has begun buying the host bus adapters and switches........ eweek.com Clariion is based on an Intel dual-computer system design that contains up to 4 processors so it fits nicely into Dell's BTO manufacturing model. The next gen Symm potentially threatens to blow HDS, HDS/Sun and HDS/HPQ out of the water because it completely removes the perception of any hardware advantage that the HDS platform may have. Since HDS, Sun and HWP are way behind in terms of the software, expect these players to resort to kamikaze pricing strategies in a vain attempt to keep EMC from widening its technical lead, as it is known for doing as soon as it grabs the lead. For example, EMC sold 200+ licenses to StorageScope and Replication Manager in 4Q2001 and 800+ licenses in 1Q2003 YET HDS, Sun and HWP still have to come up with a credible response. As if that is not bad enough, IBM and Hitachi/HDS are in the process of integrating their money-losing disk drive operations. This is a very difficult process that could jeopardize the enterprise disk drive supplies of IBM, HDS, Sun and HPQ. Seagate (55%) and Fujitsu (20+%) control more than 75% of the enterprise disk drive market and they will naturally favor their existing customers over swing customers like IBM and HDS forced to hit the market as a result of consolidation snafus. To top it all off, here's the US Supreme Court ruling today that favors genuine innovators like EMC at the expense of well-known technology followers like HDS. .....The justices said a U.S. appeals court was wrong in its ruling that reinterpreted a major, long-standing doctrine of patent law in a way that makes it tougher for inventors to prove patent infringement. Justice Anthony Kennedy said the appeals court ignored the Supreme Court's guidance in a 1997 ruling that courts must be cautious before adopting changes that disrupt the settled expectations of the inventing community. At issue was the "doctrine of equivalents," under which a device that is not an exact copy can still be found to infringe a patent if it varies from the patented device only in I-N-S-U-B-S-T-A-N-T-I-A-L details and is therefore equivalent to it........ money.cnn.com HDS can be quite dense at times. For example, it now expects that it will be the top storage hardware vendor in 2005 (instead of 2004) despite the fact that it also expects to capture no more than 5% of the storage software market. I continue to believe that the real value of the patent lawsuit against HDS is the internal turmoil that it creates at Sun and HPQ, which both have internal factions that are vehemently against reselling the HDS box. Because replication is such a key technology to have in networked storage, HDS, Sun and HPQ are now faced with the prospects of developing new methods of replication while they sell HDS' existing replication technology that is at the core EMC's patent infringement lawsuit. What these all mean is that as IT spending gradually resumes, HDS, Sun, HPQ, and even IBM are going to be plagued by Murphy's law on various fronts.