EMC&#39;s Tucci: New IBM, HP Products Not &#39;Game-Changers
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EMC CEO Joe Tucci Tuesday said the company hasn&#39;t felt the heat from the recent storage-platform product introductions by rivals IBM and Hewlett-Packard.
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(InfoWorld) - Number two storage systems maker Hewlett-Packard Co. (HP) has closed the gap between it and number one EMC Corp. to what research company IDC calls "a statistical tie." But EMC argues its lead over HP is greater if co-branded Dell-EMC storage devices are counted as EMC sales instead of as Dell Inc. sales. According to IDC's Worldwide Quarterly Disk Storage Tracker, EMC Corp. held an industry-leading 20 percent market share for external disk storage systems in the second quarter of 2006, followed by HP with a 19.3 percent share. EMC had a 21 percent share to HP's 18.9 percent in the second quarter of 2005. In the latest results, IBM Corp earned third place with a 13.2 percent share, while Hitachi Data Systems Corp., Dell Inc. and Sun Microsystems Inc. recorded market share of between 7 percent and 8 percent, which IDC labeled a three-way tie. IDC considers companies to be tied for market share if the difference between them is less than 1 percentage point, said Brad Nisbet, program manager for IDC Storage Systems. The second quarter figures show a tight race between EMC and HP, but EMC spokesman Greg Eden said EMC is further ahead than those numbers suggest. The market share numbers don't count storage devices that EMC manufactures for Dell. They are co-branded as Dell/EMC storage but counted as Dell sales revenue, he said. If Dell/EMC sales were counted as EMC revenue, the company's second quarter market share would be 26.1 percent, Eden said. IDC confirmed that number. However, EMC stumbled in the second quarter when inventory problems prevented it from fulfilling orders for some of its Symmetrix DMX3 high-end and Clarion CX3 midrange storage models. "We had double-digit growth in our bookings for our storage," Eden said, but customers wanted the newer models and were not content to buy the older ones. Manufacturers with the strongest second-quarter percentage growth from a year earlier were Sun Microsystems Inc. (19.1 percent), Hitachi (17 percent) and HP (10.3 percent.). "HP has been executing well under new management," Nisbet said, referring to President and Chief Executive Officer Mark Hurd, who replaced Carly Fiorina in March 2005. HP's storage revenue grew by 22 percent in Western Europe in the quarter, he said. Sun reported the strongest quarterly jump due in part to its acquisition of storage vendor StorageTek in 2005 and the development of the first StorageTek disk storage products, Nisbet said, while Hitachi recorded strong sales of its high-end storage products. IDC said the second quarter, which ended June 30, was the 13th consecutive quarter of revenue growth for the external disk storage sector. Revenue rose 8.5 percent to US$4.2 billion, from $3.8 billion a year earlier. Storage demand is growing as enterprises generate more data they have to manage and archive, he said. "Storage continues to be an integral component of a full (IT) solution," Nisbet said.
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Playing with its big stick Comment It took the well-dressed businessmen hanging upside down from the rafters, the acrobats with iPAQs and the data center porn to mush the concept all over my brain. HP has unseated IBM as the agenda setter in the IT game. Or at least that's what HP believes.â¦
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Fluery still roots for JBoss...Edward Tufte mostly likes iPhone interface...mysteries of Linux's /proc files...multicore compression...Actually *using* mammoth telephotos
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Continued criticism by industry insiders didn&#39;t stop vendors from OQO to Lenovo and LG from showing off ultramobile PC products with range of innovative features at the International Consumer Electronics Show (CES), held in Las Vegas this week.With many of the prototypes displayed due to hit the market later this year, UMPCs continue to be panned for their inconvenient keyboards, small screen sizes, and poor battery life ever, since the first UMPC from OQO was introduced at CES in 2004.OQO showed off a WiMax-capable OQO Model 2 UMPC, powered by Via Technologies&#39; C7-M mobile processors and running Windows Vista OS. It comes with hard-drive or flash-based solid-state drive options, supports up to 1GB of RAM, and has a sliding display that pops up to show a keyboard. Weighing around 1 pound (453 grams), prices start at $1,299.Eyes were locked on UMPC prototypes from companies including Lenovo and Founder at Intel&#39;s booth. The Lenovo device includes the Linux OS from Chinese developer Red Flag Software, and boasts a 4.8-inch touchscreen, an onboard camera, and other features. The Founder Mini-Note features a 7-inch screen, a 60GB hard drive, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth wireless networking, and weighs around 800 grams.Intel&#39;s prototypes are based on its Menlow platform, a code name given to a set of Intel chips for ultramobile PCs due out next year. Menlow will include a new low-power microprocessor, code-named Silverthorne, and a chip set code-named Poulsbo.One prototype that may never ship is a slider UMPC displayed in LG&#39;s booth, also based on the Menlow platform. The device runs Windows Vista, comes with a 4.8-inch screen, 1GB of memory, a 40GB hard disk drive, a touchscreen, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, and 3G HSDPA cellular data. A representative at the LG booth said the company had not decided whether to market the device, as it suffered from poor battery life and keyboard usage issues.UMPCs create a design challenge by virtue of being a tweener -- neither a cell phone nor a laptop, said Phil McKinney , vice president and chief technology officer at HP&#39;s personal systems group. &quot;The UMPCs -- OQO and those guys -- are trying to be too much on the small side, very heavy, not great battery life, they get hot in your hand too when you use it. But when you get north of 9-inch screens, you&#39;re getting pretty close to a laptop,&quot; McKinney said.Screens up to 7 inches are not an appropriate scale for use of screen for touch-based applications, McKinney said.UMPCs have floundered around for a while as a killer application for mobile devices hasn&#39;t been discovered yet, McKinney said. &quot;There&#39;s a lot of people coming out with products, I don&#39;t think anybody&#39;s found what the killer application or what that killer use case model really is,&quot; McKinney said.Alp Sezen, a sales director for Via Technologies based in Fremont, California, said that a reason UMPC sales have not increased dramatically, at least in the U.S., is that wireless bandwidth for mobile devices up to now has been slow.&quot;The biggest problem with ultramobile devices is they need more bandwidth. When the user experience for mobile wireless is better, that&#39;s when you will see ultramobile devices really take off,&quot; Sezen said. &quot;Right now you typically get 116K [bits per second] when you are mobile, which isn&#39;t a great user experience.&quot; A true ultramobile experience is the ability to pull out a mobile device and easily surf the Web. &quot;Right now, you can&#39;t get that experience,&quot; Sezen said.It will take a year or two for the mobile wireless experience to get better, Sezen said. &quot;WiMax, and the opening up of Verizon&#39;s EV-DO network in the third quarter this year will help give a better experience for ultramobile users.&quot;Intel has categorized UMPCs under the Mobile Internet Device (MID) nomenclature, and segments the devices further based on applications like entertainment, productivity and navigation, said Pankaj Kedia, director of the global ecosystem program for mobile Internet and UMPC platforms. The look and feel of devices, the marketing technique and what users want to buy is different, Kedia said.Clarion&#39;s UMPC, for example, will be marketed as a next-generation navigation device, Kedia said. &quot;It might have the capability of a PC under the hood, but from a user perspective it is a portable navigation mobile Internet device,&quot; Kedia said. UMPCs are more like MIDs aimed at productivity with PC capabilities inside.When asked if a prototype UMPC that Qualcomm showed off at CES would replace cell phones, company chief technology officer Sanjay Jha thought for a second and then replied: &quot;I don&#39;t know.&quot;Different people might use them in different ways, Jha said. Also, how consumers use UMPCs might depend on how successful Bluetooth becomes, he said. Some consumers might be happy to use a UMPC instead of a cell phone if they can use a Bluetooth headset to make and receive voice calls, rather than holding the larger device up to their ears, he said.Fujitsu&#39;s Paul Moore, senior director of mobile product marketing, also didn&#39;t have a definitive description of the ideal UMPC user. Someone who works on their feet a lot and is OK with typing with their thumbs might be an ideal user, he said. But he said the UMPC wouldn&#39;t necessarily replace a laptop.Terminology doesn&#39;t matter though, HP&#39;s McKinney said. &quot;Let a marketing person loose for 10 minutes and they&#39;ll come up with a category. You can say UMPC or MID, what the hell&#39;s the difference?&quot;(Nancy Gohring, Marc Ferranti, Dan Nystedt, and Martyn Williams contributed to this report).
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EMC plans to introduce a line of solid-state drives using flash memory as an option to replace some disk drives in the company&#39;s high-end Symmetrix storage arrays, a company spokesman said Monday.EMC will offer solid-state drives with capacities of 73GB and 146GB, said Abhrajit Bhattacharjee, an EMC spokesman in Singapore. The drives, which will ship this quarter, will only be available as an option with Symmetrix storage arrays, and will not be available with other products, he said.Pricing for the solid-state drives&#160;was not immediately available, but using four 73GB solid-state drives to replace four of the 146GB hard disk drives in a Symmetrix 100-disk array would increase the cost by less than 10 percent compared to a comparable system using only hard disk drives, Bhattacharjee said.Solid-state drives use memory chips instead of magnetic platters to store information. These types of drives are generally faster and consume less power than traditional disk drives, but they are also significantly more expensive.The solid-state drives are aimed at customers willing to pay a premium for the significantly faster response times these drives offer, Bhattacharjee said.EMC plans to use single-cell flash memory in its solid-state drives, which will allow for higher performance but costs more than multicell flash memory.Single-cell flash memory stores one bit of information in each memory cell, while multicell flash memory stores two. The greater density of multicell flash makes it perfect for music players and digital cameras. But multicell flash is significantly slower, making single-cell flash more suitable for high-performance applications such as solid-state drives. Single-cell flash memory is also more durable that multicell flash. Each cell on a multicell flash chip is generally good for 10,000 write/erase cycles, while the cells on single-cell chips can last for 100,000 write/erase cycles. The durability of a flash memory chip can be increased with the use of wear leveling, a technique that writes data equally to all of the memory cells on a chip instead of using the same cells repeatedly.Drives based on magnetic platters are capable of enduring unlimited write/erase cycles, but they have moving parts which can break down. Solid-state drives do not have moving parts.STEC -- the maker of the solid-state drives that EMC plans to offer -- said its solid-state drives, which use wear leveling, last more than 2 million write/erase cycles. There was no indication of how many write/erase cycles the EMC solid-state drives will be capable of sustaining.
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Firm may be facing greater difficulties than previously thought in getting hold of chips to power its high-end PCs.
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(InfoWorld) - IBM earns bragging rights for surpassing Hewlett-PackardÂ in 2006 storage hardware sales, though it still trails industry leader EMC, according to an industry report published Tuesday. IBM's market share in the global external-controller disk storage market, based on revenue, grew to 15.8 percent in 2006, from 14.5 percent in 2005, while HP's share dropped to 13.1 percent from 14.7 percent. That elevates IBM to second place behind storage market share leader EMC Corp., which grew its market share to 24.8 percent last year from 23.4 percent in 2005. "I think the records will reflect that it's been about 10 years since we passed HP," said Andy Monshaw, general manager of IBM storage. As recently as five years ago, HP had a 15-point storage market share lead over IBM. Monshaw credited a refreshed product line, a focus on selling systems rather than individual products and increased selling to the small-to-medium business market for IBM's results. HP Chairman, CEO, and President Mark HurdÂ acknowledged the weaknessÂ in his company's storage business during a presentation at a Morgan Stanley Technology Conference Monday. HP's storage revenue grew only 3 percent in its fiscal first quarter, ended Jan. 31, which Hurd attributed to the fact that much of its product line is tape storage, a declining business. However, sales of its EVA line of disk storage products grew 18 percent in the quarter. Hurd also said duringÂ the company's quarterly earnings reportÂ Feb. 20, that HP needs toÂ expand its storage sales force. "We just don't cover enough accounts," Hurd said. The rest of the storage sellers in the Gartner report, ranked by 2006 market share, are the following: Hitachi Data Systems, 9.6 percent; Dell, 7.6 percent; Network Appliance, 7.2 percent; and Sun Microsystems, 6.1 percent. Gartner noted that the storage market is increasingly dominated by the top players and is driven by industry consolidation, more effective marketing and strong channel partnerships. The top seven storage vendors accounted for 84.2 percent of the market in 2006, up from 81. 5 percent in 2006.
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I believe that investors no longer see EMC dominating the storage market. That's a good thing-in a way, even for EMC.
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IBM (Quote, Chart) continued to apply pressure to rival EMC (Quote, Chart) on the virtualization front with products that help customers improve how they shuttle data throughout different storage systems.
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Hewlett-Packard&#39;s new small- and midsize- business initiatives will rely almost completely on the channel for solutions and services, with partners acting as a differentiator against rivals like Dell and IBM, HP executives said at last week&#39;s TechXNY show
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Internal disk eats away at DAS IBM and HP are neck-and-neck for the second place position in the external disk storage market but remain well behind EMC for top billing, according to the latest report by research house IDC.â¦
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The Hopkinton data storage company EMC Corp. will roll out a set of new products today, aimed at filling out the company's &quot;information lifecycle management&quot; strategy.
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Its Workplace package is catching on with clients, and more software makers are signing on. Still, it&#39;s no Windows smasher. IBM launched a bold foray into desktop computing last spring, when it took on Microsoft&#39;s
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&quot;The biggest danger to HP and IBM is a price war,&quot; said John Enck of Gartner. &quot;Blades are still premium-priced products from IBM and HP.
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Ross Mayfield has an interesting take on the Lenovo/IBM deal and bringing open source to the desktop in his blog... I believe their commoditization strategy is more than hardware.
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Tosses LifeLine to Intel, Iomega EMC is hoping to woo OEMs with a new piece of centralized file management software aimed at small and medium sized businesses and even home users itching to craft a NAS (network attached storage) setup.â¦