From: Adam Rifkin (adam@KnowNow.com)
Date: Thu Dec 28 2000 - 13:36:46 PST
Strata wrote:
> Suppose you were a wine connoisseur, and had a number of bottles of
> extremely rare vintage that was especially sensitive to temperature
> variations. You go out to Fry's and buy a top of the line
> "mini-cellar". Fry's does sell these, though I'm not educated enough
> in the brands thereof to know the relative quality.
It's an IBM ultra dma/100 mini-cellar. Lots of quality. :) :) :)
> You bring it back to work and plug it into the powerstrip under your
> desk, the one you are always plugging and unplugging things like phone
> chargers and portable CD players into. You put your rare vintages into
> the mini-cellar after it hits the right temperature point.
> You then are free to forget about it, right? You are happy, knowing
> your vintages are safe in your top of the line mini-cellar.
I'm free to forget about it, yes. And if I have some more requirements
such as regular backups, etc., and those are really valuable to me, then
chances are they're more valuable to a lot of people. Which means that
someone will probably start a company in town to do that. And if it's
successful, more companies will start in town and vie for my business.
And the net result of all of those vyings for my business is that the
costs to me, the guy who only cares about his whine and not the
intricacies of how that wine is stored, should drop as competition
becomes cutthroat. Because once we get up in the Exabytes range
(what'll that take, 10 years?) -- that's it, it's more storage than any
person can meaningfully use.
(I take that back, Microsoft Office 2010 might use a SuperXML storage
format that requires a Gigabyte per email... gotta store all the
metadata and the metametadata and the metametameta... :)
> If you're not happy, why not? The answer may provide some insight into
> the question. If you are happy, well, maybe EMC and NetApp *are*
> overvalued. :-)
They're overvalued because the cost of RAIDs should become more and more
commoditized as the cost of storage itself falls through the floor, and
dozens of companies should be clawing out of the woodworks to steal
away market share and cut at the leaders' margins.
Another thought is that this is sounds like an Innovator's Dilemma scenario:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0875845851/forkrecommendedrA/
We're not talking about doing things twice as cheap as NetApp and EMC,
we're talking about doing things an order of magnitude cheaper... and
starting with an initially different market at lower-cost price point.
---- Adam@KnowNow.ComWe don't do drivebys, we park in front of houses and shoot. -- Eminem, "Amityville"
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