Watson: Veritas Software Corp. (Nasdaq: VRTS) is a great technology provider with ambitions to unify the SAN space. But we will soon be able to plug into their Volume Manager product via a Fibre Channel SAN.
Byte and Switch: How about the startups? There are at least 20 all claiming to offer some form of next-generation NAS architecture. BlueArc Corp. issues a press release every time it wins an account away from Network Appliance.
Watson: Huh, thats interesting. Our win/loss rate against BlueArc is miniscule. We dont see them as a significant threat in the field. But you cant blame people for wanting to be well informed of their alternatives.
Byte and Switch: Right. And BlueArc is aggressively spreading the word that its servers offer a tenfold increase in performance over the NetApp filers, with benchmarks to prove it.
Watson: BlueArc built custom ASICs [application specific integrated circuits] to do all the protocol processing that we do in software, and I salute them for that, as its hard to do. But they built a lot of chips one to process RAID subsystem management instructions, another for FTP/HTTP, another for CIFS and NFS, etc. and there is a latency inherent in this approach, too, as the data moves through each chip. The benchmarks they cite were carried out by [Intel's] Iometer and measure how fast the I/O moves in and out of the chip. We are as fast as they are on application throughput performance, which is the important metric. What BlueArc needs to do is collapse all its ASICs into one piece of hardware this is the real challenge.
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