Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Technology Stocks : All About Sun Microsystems -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: JDN who wrote (12414)	12/7/1998 10:35:00 AM
From: Bala Vasireddi	Respond to of 64865

>Hey, nothing against SUNW but I would dispute that comment. Sun has more storage options to provide depending on the application need. If you need HA and high performance they push A3000 and A5000 which can support dual-attach and high-performance storage environments. Have you seen any/all TPC benchmarks Sun does? You don't ever see one published with A7000 do you? A7000 is the really high-end (EMC-type) storage they purchase from Encore. A3000 (Dual-UltraSCSI) and A5000 (100 Mbit FC-AL) are superior in terms of performance than anything EMC can throw at Sun. They provide complete redundancy and hot-swap capabilities, meaning they can be used to real mission critical environments. What Sun loses with these however is lack of platform support. At this moment I believe they support NT and maybe HP-UX (not sure here). They require Sun to provide its own s/w drivers, hence a porting and support issue. And A3000 can only support dual-host attach. A7000 is designed for storage to be attached many different platforms (I think 8 is the max). At this moment it only supports FastSCSI interconnect. Very soon it'll support FC-AL too. In contrast how-many TPC/D benchmarks have you seen by vendors (that resell EMC) using EMC storage systems? Maybe 1 or 2. Have you ever wondered why? Even though, EMC advertises FC-AL host connect and they support upto 8 hosts, their back-end (i.e the hardware that interfaces between external interfaces and the bunch of SCSI disks) is anemic in terms of throughput. When the transaction load on the storage subsystem (during high-OLTP or Data Warehousing] goes up, their cache is overrun and the throughput actually starts falling down to FastSCSI levels. I have been associated with people who have done these benchmarks. It is not a pretty picture. On any given day Sun's A3000 and A5000 (with some cavaets) will eat EMC's lunch in terms of performance, while providing just as reliable systems. SO why does EMC win, in more situations then Sun you may ask: 1. They have a more focussed sales force who start selling high and pitch multi-platform strategy. i.e "What-ever you have in terms of OS we can connect to". This is very powerful. 2. They also pitch "storage" as the center of the universe and everything else connects to it. [I agree with this, Sun realized this a bit late] 3. They have much more focussed sales force and a very good service. Sun has generic salesforce and service which supports a more broader product line. 4. At the high-levels EMC sells into, performance DOES NOT matter. And a host of others things.....