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

To: Michael P. Michaud who wrote (3308)	12/4/1998 2:39:00 AM
From: Gus	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 17183

Symmetrix is in many ways the archetype for SANs in that it was designed to store the data for mainframes, UNIX servers and NT servers. The enabling technology for SANs is Fibre Channel. EMC and Seagate, its primary disk drive supplier, are the ones driving this industry-wide migration at the front-end and the back-end. This type of migration is not going to happen overnight. I believe EMC has sold over $500 million in Fibre channel storage subsystems over the last three years. Ciprico is another vendor that has had some success with the early adopter crowd, the folks that move digital video files. In terms of terabytes, Compaq is the top storage player largely due to the sheer breadth of its offerings of servers particularly those for the small to medium sized businesses -- a largely NT crowd -- providing much of the unit growth in servers. In terms of revenues, however, EMC is the top storage player -- ~35% of global revenues, 20+% operating margins -- reflecting the premium space it occupies. Put simply, a mainframe terabyte brings in more revenue than a UNIX terabyte which in turn brings in more revenue than a NT terabyte. I think that the important thing to remember is that NT is still not ready for primetime. Compaq, Dell and the others (150+ players) may very well succeeed in value-pricing the 330 GB and below category (where EMC does not currently compete), but in the hybrid-environments -- 330 GB and above -- where mainframes and/or UNIX servers, which currently scale up to 64 processors, have to operate side by side with NT servers, which currently scale up to 16 processors, Symmetrix is still the platform of choice. Here's an interesting snapshot of UNIX vs NT that indicates that NT is still not ready for prime time in the most lucrative segments of the enterprise. Note that I'm a longtime MSFT bull, having owned the stock in varying degrees for the last 4 years.... Unix trounces Windows NT in testing news.com "........The company ranks the major Unix variants and NT each year using a scorecard that judges six factors. Windows NT ranked last in every area except one. "NT still falls short of Unix for advanced Internet protocols and extensions. NT also lags in features for scalability, reliability, availability, serviceability, and system management," the study said....... "....D.H. Brown noted that the study doesn't reflect market share or customer satisfaction. "The industry has frequently shown that the best technology does not always win in the marketplace," the firm admitted in the study.....

To: Michael P. Michaud who wrote (3308)	12/4/1998 9:59:00 AM
From: Beltropolis Boy	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 17183

>I don't know about you guys, but all this talk about SAN's is really starting to piss me off: Does anyone know if EMC is doing anything to compete in this "revolutionary" storage area? michael. gus' response is excellent. and clearly more learned than anything a dilettante like myself could piece together. the article below may interest you too ... -chris. ----- InternetWeek November 16, 1998, Issue: 741 Section: Clients & Servers EMC, Compaq Jump Into The SAN Pile Chuck Moozakis Given the recent deluge of SAN products from vendors such as Hewlett-Packard and 3Com, you wouldn't expect storage heavyweights Compaq and EMC Corp. to miss the party. And they haven't. Early this month, Compaq and EMC took the wraps off storage area network (SAN) product plans. Compaq rolled out its StorageWorks Enterprise Backup Solution (EBS), while EMC said it would begin shipping an app to make its high-end Symmetrix Enterprise Storage arrays a more integral part of Windows NT-oriented SAN deployments. "One of the biggest issues NT users have to deal with is online backup," said Tom Lahive, a Dataquest analyst. "Compaq is offering an end-to-end solution for that. IT managers will know it will work with their Compaq servers." Compaq's EBS ties together Fibre Channel host bus adapters, a 12-port hub, tape controllers, Compaq's new 35/70 entry-level DLT library and SAN backup software from Computer Associates Inc. and Seagate Software, said Guy MacKenzie, product manager. The result, he said, is a fully interoperable package tailored to IT managers that want to offload their backup and restore operations from their LANs to specially configured SANs. The 35/70 tape device is capable of storing up to 1 terabyte of data at a backup rate of 36 gigabytes per hour. EBS, due in December, is priced from $80,000 to $100,000, and is geared to NT and NetWare deployments. Support for Unix and additional libraries and hardware configurations will be offered in 1999. Volume Logix overcomes NT's volume-locking architecture, in which NT servers essentially treat any connected storage as their private domain, said Jim Rothnie, EMC's senior vice president. To that end, Volume Logix lets IT managers hook up as many as 64 NT servers to a single Symmetrix, paving the way for shared storage. "It's absolutely important for NT," Rothnie said. "Volume Logix will give Symmetrix the capability to refuse [NT servers] access to logical volumes they aren't authorized to access." Tom Woteki, CIO for the American Red Cross, said the organization is evaluating EMC's SAN products. "We are in the initial process of exploring the use of Fibre Channel; we haven't made a commitment to use it, but we have a lot of confidence in EMC's products," he said. EMC extended Symmetrix Fibre Channel hub support to NT servers from Compaq, Dell, HP and Siemens AG. The hub allows multiple servers to be lashed to a single Symmetrix port. VolumeLogix will be available within 30 days; it is priced between $15,000 and $35,000. Copyright ® 1998 CMP Media Inc.