Important Things 1999

What does EMC want to do?

IT1999: Oracle has given the world a surprise, now it’s EMC ? Maybe it’s a good choice to buy NetApp, not Data Domain. IBM wanted to buy SUN, why EMC doesn’t want to buy NetApp?

It’s market capacity of those IT companies from google finance.

EMC    13.54    +0.03    (0.22%)      27.26B
DDUP    33.21    +0.08    (0.24%)      2.09B
NTAP    19.78    +0.38    (1.96%)      6.64B
QTM    0.835    +0.045    (5.70%)      175.52M
CSCO    18.99    +0.08    (0.42%)      109.53B

DDUP is about 31.5% of NTAP, so, why not NetApp? EMC always buys  cheaper one, is it true?

Let’s think about it, EMC has NetApp and Quantum.  Heheeeeeeeeeeeeee….. The US government should not NOT allow this happening.

EMC is NOT Oracle, so we just read the following news for pleasure.

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EMC extends offer to buy Data Domain for $30 per share
On Friday June 26, 2009, 5:11 pm EDT
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/EMC-Extends-Cash-Tender-Offer-prnews-3556015102.html?x=0&.v=1

HOPKINTON, Mass. (AP) — Data storage company EMC Corp. said Friday that it extended its offer to buy Data Domain Inc. for $30 per share in an all-cash deal.

The offering now expires at midnight on July 10. Previously, EMC’s offer, which had begun on June 2, was to expire at midnight on Monday.

EMC had said last week that it would refile notice of its offer to buy the data backup and disaster recovery systems provider to ensure federal authorities have time to review it.

Data Domain said June 15 that EMC’s offer is not in the best interest of its shareholders and that it prefers a bid from data storage provider NetApp Inc.

NetApp and Data Domain had said in early June that they reached a deal for Data Domain to be bought for $1.9 billion in cash and stock. NetApp originally offered $1.5 billion, or $25 per share in cash and stock, on May 20, before EMC produced a higher offer of $30 per share.

NetApp later matched EMC’s offer, and Data Domain agreed to NetApp’s new offer.

EMC said about 174,645 common shares of Data Domain — or less than half of a percent of all outstanding common shares — had been tendered by Friday afternoon.

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http://phx.corporate-ir.net/staging/phoenix.zhtml?c=69905&p=irol-newsArticle&ID=1270551&highlight=

Quantum Secures $100 Million Financing Commitment From EMC to Enable Refinance of Quantum’s Convertible Debt
Will Give Quantum Greater Financial Flexibility and Help Ensure Continued, High Level of Investment in Deduplication Innovation
SAN JOSE, CA, Mar 27, 2009 (MARKET WIRE via COMTEX) — Quantum Corp. (NYSE: QTM), the leading global specialist in backup, recovery and archive, today announced that it has secured a $100 million financing commitment from EMC Corp.(1) (NYSE: EMC) that Quantum will use to refinance its convertible debt (see separate release issued today, titled “Quantum Commences Tender Offer for its 4.375% Convertible Subordinated Notes Due 2010″). By doing so, Quantum will address a key challenge posed by its current capital structure and the very constrained credit environment: the obligation to refinance a majority of its convertible debt by February 2010. EMC, which licenses Quantum’s deduplication software for use in some of its industry-leading networked storage products, made the $100 million financing commitment to help ensure that Quantum can continue to invest in the technology enhancements required by EMC to meet the needs of their customers in this fast-growing sector.

IT1999: CISCO is selling server NOW! What else CISCO can do. CISCO, Everywhere, maybe soon.

The following content is copied from http://www.enterprisestorageforum.com/ipstorage/news/article.php/3810666

EMC, NetApp Could Gain From Cisco’s Server Plans

March 17, 2009
By Paul Shread

Cisco (NASDAQ: CSCO) is pushing its vision of converged data center fabrics to a new level with the new Unified Computing System — and is threatening to shake up the data storage market in the process.

The new systems, which unite servers, networks and storage in a single platform, could provide a big boost for the emerging Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) standard and for data storage giant EMC (NYSE: EMC), whose VMware (NYSE: VMW) subsidiary is central to Cisco’s new offering.

In addition to VMware, EMC’s Smarts and ControlCenter server, network and storage management tools are also part of the collaboration. EMC and Cisco said in a statement that they “will focus on discovery and dependency mapping, automated root cause analysis and policy-based configuration management.”

NetApp (NASDAQ: NTAP) is another potential winner. Along with EMC, NetApp was mentioned as a data storage partner for Cisco’s new offering.

Patrick Rogers, NetApp’s vice president for solutions marketing, said the company’s strength in Ethernet-based storage made it a natural partner for Cisco. He said NetApp believes that Ethernet will become the preferred data center fabric, and he had praise for Cisco’s interconnect, storage access layer and integrated management technologies. NetApp and Cisco will collaborate on a variety of virtualization and consolidation offerings for servers, desktops and applications.

Emulex (NYSE: ELX) and QLogic (NASDAQ: QLGC) are also Cisco UCS storage partners.

On the competitive side of the picture, the announcement threatens to turn Cisco’s rivalry with Brocade (NASDAQ: BRCD) up another notch, as the two have been at the forefront of storage and network switch vendors positioning for converged data center fabrics.

Brocade was dismissive of Cisco’s efforts, saying in a statement that Cisco’s approach to unified computing “is not revolutionary. Many companies with extensive experience, including Brocade, in solving complex data center issues are already working on solutions.”

Brocade said Cisco’s approach “is likely to be very capital-intensive up front,” and the company said that converged data centers should be “tackled by a broad ecosystem of industry partners and not based on a proprietary singular architecture of one company.”

Analysts Weigh In On Cisco’s UCS

Analysts also had much to say about Cisco’s bold entry into the server market.

Enterprise Strategy Group analysts Mark Bowker, Steve Duplessie and Jon Oltsik wrote that Cisco’s platform joins storage and network I/O traffic through the UCS Fabric Interconnect.

“While this technology depends upon Cisco’s proprietary Data Center Ethernet (DCE), it does eliminate the need for a separate Fibre Channel infrastructure,” they wrote.

UCS uses an FCoE network that “roughly equates to a top of the rack system” yet “scales well beyond a single rack,” they said. The system doesn’t use Cisco’s Nexus 5000 switches or 2000 series fabric extenders, but instead uses customized equipment called the Fabric Interconnect and Fabric Extender to route traditional LAN and SAN traffic to core IP and FC networks.

While major server vendors like IBM (NYSE: IBM), HP (NYSE: HPQ), Sun (NASDAQ: JAVA) and Dell (NASDAQ: DELL) can’t be pleased that a major partner has become a competitor, the analysts said they expect HP and IBM to create new alliances with the likes of Brocade/Foundry and Juniper (NASDAQ: JNPR) to “diminish their reliance on Cisco.”

Greg Schulz, founder and senior analyst at StorageIO Group, said that while FCoE is still in the early adopter phase, “for those who need it and can afford it, it has a primary market opportunity for aggregating server ports to fan in to traditional SANs,” at least until it becomes a proven technology for mission-critical applications.

Taneja Group analyst Dave Bartoletti said the announcement is “significant because Cisco has acknowledged that virtualization is the new unifying data center architecture. … This is quite an admission, and confirms that virtualization has won.”

But Bartoletti said the product itself “is a sort of anti-virtualization strategy. They’ve gathered up several virtualization technologies and wrapped them in a Cisco box. Everything inside will be Cisco developed or chosen. Vendors will have to squeeze in between the big invited partners in order to craft any added-value solutions, and Cisco will decide who’s allowed in.”

Virtualization, Bartoletti said, “broke tightly coupled components apart and in doing so created a new class of solution opportunities. VMware competes with its partners to fill these new needs, but has no lock on any one. Every tier of a virtualized infrastructure is vulnerable to replacement.

“It seems to me that Cisco and its huge partners now want to gather the best of these solutions up, package them, and tell customers, ‘don’t waste time or money crafting a virtualization solution from parts. We’ve put the best together already.’ I’m not convinced that’s going to win hearts and minds any more successfully than Microsoft did when it tried to package web browsing as a ‘feature’ of Windows.”

Now, we can use disk as data backup media, so it appeared, the dedupe.

We think disk can be more available than tape, and it’s more suitable for random read and write I/O, and there is no need to mount tape and find record position. All of physical operations can be replace by disk header’s moving.

It’s funny.

Dedupe depends on the safety of the first backup data, if it lost for any reason, the hazard can not be evaluated.

To make sure the first data is available at any time, let’s look at what we can do.

First, we using RAID, most is RAID5, even RAID6. With hot spare disk, we can prevent data lost under two disks broken.

Second, Volume Mirror.

Third, data file can be splitted to blocks and stored in distribution storage, maybe it like the concept of cloud storage, which is prompted by EMC now.

Forth, multicopy over network.

Fifth, tape backup. Haaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa, we return to the start point. Under most circumstance tape-backup is not the best choice comparing with disk-backup, but no one can discard it. If using this method, we assume disk dedupe will not lose data in most situation, if lose, whether it can be recovered, depends on our fortune or planning. If you have a careful design of tape-backup planning, such as shedule testing and recovery, dual copies in different sites, tape-backup is reliable. So why we still use dedupe?

Dedupe, using time to change space. We have powerful calculation, but limit disk space(more expensive than tape). To save space must consume CPU, alse using more CPU in recovery.

Another question, how long the method of dedupe can exist. Tape can be preserved in tens of year, but dedupe device? The deduped data must be re-stored or re-backuped in tapes at last, untill we found other mothed to replace tape.

by IT1999

at 1:00am, Feb. 19, 2009