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Emulex Slaps Rivals With Report

Emulex Corp. (Nasdaq: EMLX) is using a study it commissioned from
research firm IDC to trash its competitors' products. But an analyst at a rival firm says the IDC findings smell mighty funny.

According to Emulex, the study shows quantifiable, money-saving benefits of using Emulex's Fibre Channel host bus adapters (HBAs). IDC compared the productivity, efficiency, and uptime provided by storage area networks with Emulex HBAs against SANs that use other vendors' wares.

While the report doesn't name Emulex's competitors specifically, key players in this segment include Agilent Technologies Inc. (NYSE: A), JNI Corp. (Nasdaq: JNIC), and QLogic Corp. (Nasdaq: QLGC).

And these rivals won't like the results. IDC says it found that shops that use Emulex are 27 percent more productive than those that don't. In other words, storage management personnel at sites that
use Emulex products supposedly spend 27 percent less time managing the SAN infrastructure. With regard to efficiency, which IDC defines as management hours required per terabyte of storage, the research firm claims that the Emulex SANs needed 24 percent less time for care and feeding.

Provocatively, the IDC study says Emulex SANs have 49.2 hours of
additional uptime per year compared with competing products. IDC
says this translates into $3 million per year of increased "revenue-generation
opportunity." The report says Emulex shops average 31.3 hours of downtime per
year (both planned and unplanned) versus 80.6 hours of
downtime for the competition.

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