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

To: jwright who wrote (829)	4/5/1999 3:52:00 PM
From: DownSouth	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 10934

I don't know, jw. Perhaps NTAP chickened out or perhaps the benchmark look invalid or measured performance in a biased way. No way to tell. NTAP has loads of experience in this arena, though. They have always performed very well, very often and very early on the NFS benchmarks and published those results openly. They also participated in some CIFS benchmarks. I didn't mean to make you go away. I am just trying to understand. If NTAP winced at a valid test, we need to know. If competitors are touting a test biased in their favor, we need to know.

To: jwright who wrote (829)	4/7/1999 1:22:00 AM
From: Hal Barnett	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 10934

jwright, Regarding the bakeoff benchmark that you cited. bakeoff.ircache.net Thanks for the information. I downloaded the report which appears to be a scanned image file rather than a PDF text file. This makes the document difficult to read. My cursory review of the bakeoff is that this was a technical test of hardware performance features and not a test of what I would consider real world customer applications. For example, the test rules called for filling up the cache and looking at technical measures that I would think are not relevant for evaluating the overall performance of a caching device in a business setting. I would prefer to see specific applications tested such as serving up a catalog of electronic designs in an engineering design environment. Or serving up a data base of business information in a corporate finance and administration environment. Technical data points for hardware performance are less useful than a report that says 250 concurrent engineering users can retrieve complex electronic designs in a very acceptable time-frame using application X in a specific software and hardware configuration. For many customers, overall application performance in a realistic peak load user environment is of great interest. Especially if significant performance differences can be attributed to specific software and hardware combinations. Just my thoughts and thanks for the good information. Regards, ...Hal