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

To: Neil S who wrote (691)	7/24/1998 1:07:00 PM
From: Neil S	Respond to of 4808

The Register on CPQ: Compaq merges it and Digital's storage strategy But gaps still there in the line Posted 23 July 1998 Compaq has merged it and Digital's storage lines in a further sign that the company is moving rapidly to assimilate the company it took over earlier this year. It will use the name Compaq StorageWorks to cover the entire gamut of storage options it will sell, which, it now claims, scales from PC servers up to mainframes. But the StorageWorks unit of Compaq relies on a number of third parties to fill in gaps in its armoury. Donnal Madden, storage product manager at Compaq UK, said that the company had decided to continue with the StorageWorks branding, formerly a Digital trademark and was concentrating on growth areas of the market. Those include the rapidly growing NT server market, but the company in its new guise will continue selling mid-range and high end kit, using a combination of technology licensed from StorageTek and, at the mainframe level, Hitachi. It will also offer Digital's own RA range of products for sales worth over $100,000, he said. It will continue to offer re-branded Quantum solid state disks for the VMS market and will also sell a series of tape products. Compaq said that large corporations were rapidly moving to adopt storage area networks (SANs) and that it considered that its strategy using fibre channel was the best way to move towards implementing that technology. In September it will launch an enterprise tape back up system using technology developed by it, Computer Associates and Seagate Technology, he added. The channel strategy of both Digital and Compaq will remain largely intact. However, UK distributor Ideal Hardware, which started selling StorageWorks earlier this year, has now become a fully accredited Compaq channel, and will sell its entire range of notebooks, desktops and servers. The sales force at Digital which sold the high end systems will continue to do so, largely directly. Madden said: "We do believe there is a new kid on the block. In 1997, storage sales were turned on their head and a Compaq customer spends more on storage than on the server component. Mainframe will not and will never be a strategic area for us." However, Madden said that Compaq now believed that Unix was important to it. "That was an area we couldn't touch until recently," he said. Compaq believed it was now the number one storage company in the world, given its multi-vendor approach, he added.