Sales were up 6 percent to $5.39 billion, about $30 million below the consensus of $5.42 billion. Earnings per share were 39 cents, a penny off the expected 40 cents.

Never fear, though. EMC says it will still meet its guidance for the fiscal year. It still expects to earn $1.85 a share on sales of $23.5 billion. In the meantime, it will buy back $1 billion worth of stock this year.

EMC shares fell by 2 percent in pre-market trading.

Meanwhile, VMware, the cloud computing software company in which EMC is a majority shareholder, is getting whacked this morning on disappointing outlook. It reported earnings yesterday. VMware said it now expects sales in the range of $1.21 billion to $1.24 billion, below the consensus view of $1.25 billion. VMware shares are falling in pre-market trading. As of 8:45 am ET, the price was $71.51, down $4.19 or 5.5 percent.

You can’t say you weren’t warned. IBM’s first earnings miss in eight years certainly had all the appearances of a big red flag about the IT industry generally, and hardware sales specifically. Now we have to see whether or not Big Blue turns out to be an accurate read-through for NetApp and Hewlett-Packard.

That’s the conclusion of Chris Whitmore, an analyst with Deutsche Bank Securities, in the wake of yesterday’s earnings report. “IBM hasn’t missed consensus earnings expectations for eight years which raises the specter of increased macro risk and substantially weaker IT hardware spending,” he wrote in a note to clients today.

IBM is better than most at managing sales that turn south in one part of its business, but still able to make its numbers, he writes. That it wasn’t able to do so this quarter “raises a red flag” for other tech companies, especially those that sell a lot of hardware, including Hewlett-Packard, Dell, NetApp and EMC. “The IBM miss is a decidedly negative read through for the entire IT hardware segment and we are incrementally more cautious on the sector,” Whitmore wrote.

Expect a lot of attention on IT spending trends in the coming weeks, as other large IT companies get ready to report their results. The next big indicator will be when EMC reports quarterly results next week. HP, Dell and NetApp all report results in mid-May.

Unified Patents plans to recruit companies for a collective effort to deter patent lawsuits or legal threats against its members.

The first to join United are Internet giant Google and NetApp, which makes data-storage hardware. But the venture plans to set itself apart by also recruiting small tech companies, which often have trouble defending themselves.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

In response, the once-lethargic $20+ billion enterprise storage industry is exhibiting unprecedented innovation. Giants like EMC and Dell are vying with, partnering with and acquiring start-ups for supremacy in a morphing landscape.

It’s a serious game. More than $3.5 billion was pumped into VC-backed storage start-ups between 2007 and 2011, with more than $1 billion in 2011 alone. And $10 billion more has been poured into M&A, with the most recent example being EMC’s $430 million purchase of a company that hasn’t finished developing an initial product. Tectonic shifts come from collisions of forces. There are three major force vectors here.

First is the demand for more scalable, instantly provisionable, faster and higher-capacity storage. Even in an anemic economy, demand for data storage grows more than 50 percent per year.

Storage in a Flash

The second driver is the widespread proliferation of flash memory. Remember when you could feel the hard drive spinning inside your iPod? Today, practically every consumer carries flash memory in his or her pocket or purse.

Flash has been around for years, but was too expensive for broad adoption. Thanks to companies like Apple, which consume enormous amounts of flash, the cost is dropping like an apple from a tree. It’s still much more expensive than rotating hard drives, but its notable physics are compelling. Solid-state flash is faster than mechanical drives, and doesn’t forget everything when the power is turned off. Perfect, right?

Flash in the Pan?

Actually, not so perfect for corporate, governmental or cloud environments. In addition to high cost, flash has some unfortunate features. For example, it wears out in the same way your favorite pair of jeans will become threadbare with use. You’ll never wear out your phone from too much texting. But in an enterprise application, the number of IOPS can be so staggering that flash has to be treated almost like a printer cartridge, a consumable.

Many companies are developing techniques to deal with flash’s inherent limitations to make it suitable for data centers. It’s a gold rush, with vast sums of capital chasing big markets. That $430 million acquisition by EMC? Yup, flash.

Why pay so much for a pre-product company? There were multiple bidders. NetApp made a rich offer, which Dell topped by a lot, which EMC topped by an equally wide margin. There will be more M&A.

Interestingly, this activity is driving breakneck commoditization. This is great for customers, but not for vendors, who will not long enjoy rapacious (oops, I meant healthy) margins on proprietary technology. Ironically, the value in flash-based systems is really in the software that wrests the value from the hardware. Everyone in the industry knows that the days of differentiated flash hardware are numbered.

When Is Storage Not Real? When It’s Virtual.

As if hot, high demand and cool flash aren’t enough, the storage games are impacted by a third force called virtualization. Virtualization has transformed computing. The leading vendor, VMware (not coincidentally, owned by storage company EMC), has built a market capitalization of roughly $40 billion. All by making fake computers.

We call them virtual machines. Your iPhone may be talking to one right now over the Internet. Their magic allows the creation of what looks like a physical computer server. A virtual machine, or VM, appears to embody central processing units, memory and communication networks like physical computers. But it’s a software abstraction. Through this prestidigitation, data centers run scores of VMs on a single server box.

Enterprises can deploy vastly more applications because virtualization from Microsoft, Citrix, Red Hat and VMware saves enormously on capital and operating expenses. And provisioning is so much faster. Just a few clicks and, voila, you have a new server. By the way, you can buy server hardware from anyone. That freedom makes vendors compete harder, which you like if you run an information technology department.

What does this have to do with data storage?

Enterprise and cloud storage still live in the physical age. That is, storage system features are embedded in proprietary hardware. Want a cool software feature? You have to buy hardware to get it. Before virtualization, this was how the server industry worked. But virtualization is stressing traditional modes of delivering storage to applications. Performance problems, high costs and inflexibility cause VM users great pain on a daily basis.

Hello, Storage Hypervisor

The key enabling technology in compute virtualization is called a hypervisor. This core magic remade the server industry for the benefit of all. Until recently, there was no storage equivalent.

Now the storage industry is beginning to buzz about the concept of a storage hypervisor — the analog of the server hypervisor, but for storage. Storage hypervisors promise to increase the effective performance of hardware by an order of magnitude. By virtualizing resources to provide the administrative paradigm needed in virtualized environments — VM-centric management — they provide unprecedented flexibility and efficiency. Naturally, the ideal storage hypervisor leverages flash, just as server hypervisors unleash the power of Intel-based silicon.

Giant publicly-traded storage vendors and ambitious start-ups alike are talking up their offerings. All have differing approaches, but share the goal of giving data-center storage buyers the benefits already bestowed on server customers.

A Serious Game

Today we observe a convergence of forces transforming a multi-billion dollar market. The unending pressure for more data increases demand for high-performance flash-based storage hardware. This in turn is driving the essential requirement for virtualization of storage hardware resources. This confluence will enable vastly larger amounts of storage to be applied to every imaginable use case, all while making the economics not only affordable, but also compelling.

The winners in this game? Corporate and cloud data centers and their users. In other words, you.

Before co-founding Virsto, Mark Davis was CEO of storage resource management vendor Creekpath, where he engineered its acquisition by Opsware (now HP).

Asa Mathat / AllThingsD.com

In the TV interview (see it below), Ellison made news, saying that Oracle will not be doing any large acquisitions, especially NetApp, the storage concern that has been occasionally mentioned as a possible target. Ellison said there would be no large acquisitions.

“We think we have all the assets in-house to grow very rapidly on an organic basis,” he said.

Baritoromo had clearly been reading AllThingsD because she made a point to call out Ellison’s 45 percent share of NetSuite. In a subtle dig at Salesforce.com and its CEO Marc Benioff, Ellison has been calling Oracle “the first cloud computing company.”

Then it was on to his keynote — his second of the conference — where he revisited in additional detail some of the points he made in his first keynote from Sunday, but also did some demos.

For one thing, Ellison reminded the audience that while Oracle may not yet be the biggest software-as-a-service company by revenue, it does offer more applications on a SAAS basis than anyone else — which, given Oracle’s just-completed rewrite of its entire suite of applications for the cloud, is a factual claim.

But he also made some important pronouncements around his view of how the cloud runs, again making subtle digs at the competition. “When you run in the cloud, you also pick the infrastructure that it runs on,” he said. That’s a dig at Salesforce and other smaller SAAS companies that seek to compete in some manner or another with Oracle. Sign on for the application, you’re stuck with the platform and other infrastructure that the company selling it has running in their data center.

It was an easy segue from there to Oracle’s public and private cloud offerings. Ellison said Oracle has about 400 customers using its new Fusion applications. He said about two thirds of those customers were running their applications in Oracle’s public cloud, while about one third were doings so on dedicated machines on premise.

But since both the public and private cloud are essentially equivalent — after all, they run on the same hardware and the same software — it’s easy for a company to change its mind. “They can move to an Oracle private cloud or public cloud without changing anything,” he said. “It’s very easy to move applications back and forth.” He thinks many of those customers will do just that and switch over to the public cloud within a year. “We’ll have more visibility into that by this time next year,” he said.

Part one of Ellison’s CNBC interview is below. The other parts, where he talks about increasing Oracle’s dividend, explains why the hardware business shrank, why he bought all those houses, calls his late friend Steve Jobs irreplaceable, and then kidded Baritoromo about buying the LA Lakers are also all online.

The good news is that earnings, at $1 on a per-share basis, will be slightly higher than had been previously expected. The bad news is that those earnings will count only on a non-GAAP basis, because HP intends to take a combined $9.5 billion to $9.7 billion in charges this quarter, the most in its history: $8 billion for a writedown in the value of its IT services unit, the company formerly known as EDS; and $1.5 billion to $1.7 billion for restructuring charges associated primarily with the voluntary retirement and firing of some 9,000 HP employees.

The job reductions are only the first round of an expected 27,000 cuts that will occur between now and 2015. HP CEO Meg Whitman has said the restructuring is needed to get HP down to a size where its longer-term business prospects are more tenable.

However, the pressures on its many lines of business are numerous and intensifying. If the results that rival Dell reported yesterday imply anything, it’s that the state of the personal computer business, of which HP remains the global leader — though only by a whisker — is dismal.

Revenue from Dell’s PC business fell 14 percent, and its consumer business took the bluntest part of the blow, falling 22 percent from the year-ago period. HP may fare better, but only slightly so, says analyst Chris Whitmore of Deutsche Bank in a note to clients earlier this week. The consistent popularity of Apple’s iPad continues to eat into notebook sales, Whitmore says, while those still in the market for a new PC are waiting for Microsoft to get Windows 8 into the marketplace. “Looking ahead, we expect summer PC shipments to experience a slowdown ahead of the Windows 8 release, expected this fall and improving into the holidays with Win 8 related inventory restocking,” he wrote.

But PCs aren’t the only trouble spot for HP. Results from Canon, Lexmark and Xerox all point to a weak market for printers and printer supplies.

Then there’s servers and storage. Ongoing uncertainty in HP’s Business Critical Server business, brought on by the continuing legal fight with Oracle concerning the Intel-made Itanium chip, is hurting not only the sales in its high-end Integrity line of servers, but the associated service and support fees that HP collects from customers who buy them. Whitmore reckons that HP has lost some of its share of this specialized market to IBM. Meanwhile, sales of mainstream servers are also thought to have declined, as well, while in storage, EMC and NetApp are also thought to be taking business from HP.

If all that weren’t enough, there’s the vexing problem of HP’s services business: The writedown of EDS is only the first step in a long, complicated process that is intended to turn that unit toward a smaller number of more protein-rich, profitable contracts, and away from more numerous less-profitable ones. As Whitmore put it: “We expect these programs to take considerable time to develop and market. Increasing the size and depth of HP’s Services bench will likely take multiple quarters before translating into improving market share performance. As a result, we continue to expect a long, slow turnaround in EDS.”

On top of all that is the bitter frosting of the world economy. HP does more than one-third of its business in Europe, where the weakness of the euro versus the U.S. dollar adds additional headwinds that have only gotten worse since last quarter. And it’s unlikely to get better anytime soon, Whitmore says: “If the recent strengthening of the U.S. dollar is maintained, year-on-year revenue compares will continue to be a meaningful headwind in future quarters.”

See you later today.

It has been only two years since the enterprise storage wars. In fact, it was two years ago this month that Dell and Hewlett-Packard bitterly battled over 3Par. HP won that fight, paying $2.4 billion for the storage concern. Dell bought Compellent instead, while IBM took out Netezza. All told, it was a $5 billion M&A bonanza that ended just as suddenly as it started.

By joining the loose collection of companies I’ve dubbed the Flash Madness Club — companies that have tossed their hats in the ring, either selling or relying on flash memory in a big way — IBM, a lot of people are speculating, will force rivals like HP, Dell and maybe Oracle to start rolling up the other flash-technology players. Nor is IBM done buying in this area.

The main target of all this is Fusion-io, the Utah-based flash-technology company that first went public last year, and which is remembered mostly for its data-center supply relationships with Facebook and Apple.

Fusion’s primary product is the ioDrive, an insert card that essentially speeds up conventional servers by feeding data to the main processor faster than the relatively poky hard drive. Fusion shares rose 7 percent on the speculation, closing yesterday at $28.23.

At that price, it trades at a market cap of about $2.6 billion. Assuming a 50 percent premium, it would, in a hypothetical deal, probably go for about $4 billion, assuming there wasn’t a crazy bidding war.

But there would be. Fusion’s primary strength is its OEM relationships. (OEM is industry lingo for Original Equipment Manufacturer.) In these relationships, Fusion sells its products like the ioDrive to such companies as HP, Dell and IBM, which then offer them as part of their own distinct servers.

The product is considered strategic enough that if one big IT player were to try and buy it, the others would put up a fight and offer competing bids to prevent Fusion from falling into the hands of a competitor. Fusion would become a much more expensive target rather quickly.

But, at the same time, the winning bidder would own an asset that would instantly lose value. If, for example, HP closed a Fusion-io acquisition, can you realistically see Dell and IBM continuing to do business with it? Future growth of Fusion’s products would have to offset that lost revenue. And given the concentration, the loss of one partner would be a big blow: 82 percent of Fusion’s revenue in its most recent quarter was made up of individual companies, each accounting for 10 percent of sales or more. A target that would get progressively more expensive in a bidding war and then lose value right away doesn’t look like a good deal.

Longer-term, there’s a lot of value in Fusion’s relationship with the end customers. Even when an OEM sells a server with Fusion’s technology inside it, it is usually Fusion and not the OEM that supports the product with software upgrades and maintenance. As more companies begin running hardware with Fusion’s technology inside them — banks and financial institutions are big fans of it, for one thing — owning Fusion would make sense for one of the big IT companies.

But here’s another thought: If Fusion is to be acquired, the thinking goes that it would have to acquired by either a traditional IT company or a dedicated storage player. HP and EMC are the ones being mentioned as possible buyers in the analyst notes today. But why not Intel?

The world’s biggest chipmaker has the cash — $13.7 billion, as of its most recent quarter — and is constantly looking for ways to expand its relationships with the hardware vendors. And since Intel already does business with all the OEMs that Fusion does, none would lose access to its technology. There are probably a lot more things to consider, but I just don’t see why Intel is not part of this conversation.

Sales were $106.6 million, and per-share earnings were 9 cents, easily besting the consensus of $96 million and 3 cents. Great, but that’s not what got investors so excited that they kicked Fusion shares up by 26 percent in the after-hours session. The company said it expects sales in its fiscal year 2013 to grow 45 percent to 50 percent, well ahead of the 37 percent analysts had been expecting.

At least part of that outlook stems from things like the super-secret deal Fusion did with enterprise storage concern NetApp last week, and also the trend of servers going all flash, thanks in part to Fusion’s software.

“We got new products and new opportunities within existing markets, so we feel pretty good,” CEO David Flynn told me in a brief conference call after Fusion reported earnings today. All the new stuff going on is offsetting what has been the traditional criticism against Fusion since its IPO last summer: That it relies too heavily on large purchase orders from a small number of customers, specifically Apple and Facebook, who buy a lot of Fusion’s technology for use in their data centers.

“They’re representing a smaller overall portion of our business as these new opportunities develop,” Flynn told me.

One other thing he said: Some of those big customers have some pretty aggressive plans to scale out their data centers. “These relationships have afforded us some visibility on their plans, and we’ve factored that into our guidance with high confidence.” It looks to me like Fusion-io’s guidance is quickly becoming a pretty good barometer for the overall state of the data center business.

It’s kind of a weird announcement, where neither company is disclosing what it’s all about. The only hints we get are from the press release, saying they are:

… working closely with storage industry leader NetApp to provide solutions using server-side flash and caching software products when used in conjunction with the NetApp Virtual Storage Tier. The two companies are collaborating on low-latency, high-performance solutions for compatibility between the Fusion ioMemory platform and NetApp’s Data ONTAP operating system, as well as key caching solutions, including NetApp Flash Cache, NetApp Flash Pool and Fusion-io caching software.

Basically, we’re going to see Fusion’s technology in NetApp products, coming soon to a data center near you.

The news can’t help but be seen as a reaction to EMC’s acquisition of Israeli flash technology concern XtremeIO in May. EMC paid somewhere between $430 million and $450 million for that company, and the combination was seen at the time as a blow to Fusion-io and NetApp. Shares of both have been trading in lower ranges since that deal. Fusion, which first went public last summer, has been the subject of persistent speculation as an acquisition target. EMC’s deal was expected to kick off a round of acquisitions.

The collaboration should also affect the outlooks of Violin Memory and Pure Storage. Violin raised $80 million in a Series D round of venture capital funding in April, at an implied valuation of $800 million, and has been marching steadily toward an IPO no later than October.

Pure Storage is the other flash player worth watching here. It came out of stealth last summer with a $30 million Series C investment and a plan to use flash to disrupt the business of storage arrays.

Fusion, you’ll recall, is a founding member of the Flash Madness Club. Its flash memory insert cards for servers are widely used in data centers of companies like Apple, Salesforce.com and Facebook, speeding up the ability of servers to process data by eliminating bottlenecks created by conventional hard drives. Its customers also include Hewlett-Packard, Dell and IBM, among other server manufacturers who offer Fusion’s products, like its ioDrive inserts as a build-to-order option.

The markets don’t quite seem to know what to make of it, either, as all three are falling in premarket trading in New York. NetApp shares fell by 33 cents, or 1 percent, to $32.58, while Fusion shares fell by 13 cents to $19.50. EMC shares fell by 18 cents to $26.38.

Former Yahoo marketing head Elisa Steele, who left that company in December, is joining Skype as its new chief marketing officer. Steele, who worked at Yahoo under former CEO Carol Bartz, will become CMO of the Internet communications company, as well as a corporate VP at Microsoft.

Steele will report directly to Skype President Tony Bates and will oversee Skype’s global brand for the unit, which is owned by the software giant.

Before Yahoo, Steele has previously worked at NetApp and Sun Microsystems, also in marketing roles.

Well, today we heard from another bank, and its opinions about Intel’s Romley chip and what it means for data center spending couldn’t be more different. Chris Whitmore, an analyst with Deutsche Bank Market Research, published a note to clients today, arguing that Romley will indeed spur a new round of spending in corporate data centers, and that it will have an equally strong secondary effect on the fortunes of enterprise storage companies, specifically EMC and NetApp.

One of the things that Romley will encourage, Whitmore writes, is a growth in the density of virtual machines running in each server. (Remember that, more often than not, a physical server is virtualized or subdivided into many virtual servers, allowing each machine to act like several machines.) More virtual machines allows you to consolidate your physical machines and add more in the same footprint if you want, which in turn means more computing work getting done overall. Whitmore estimates that, in general, data centers will boost their workloads by 20 to 25 percent by the end of next year.

Roughly 26 percent of Romley chip purchases will be used in these virtualized environments, Whitmore estimates. And that tends to spur demand for storage to support the virtual machines. In fact, the growth of terabytes worth of storage products shipped mirrors closely the unit growth of servers. (See the graphic, below, which I screen-grabbed from the report; click to see it bigger.) In short, it’s good news for NetApp and EMC. Whitmore says both are taking share from other vendors, including IBM, Hewlett-Packard and Dell, with sales growing at north of 20 percent a year — a growth rate that’s higher than that of the overall market, which grew 14 percent last year. He rates shares of both EMC and NetApp a “buy,” with price targets of $35 and $60, respectively.

Great news for EMC and NetApp, but what does it mean for Intel? Whitmore says to expect a mixed bag. Companies wanting to boost their use of virtual machines will be buyers. Companies that aren’t into virtualization so much, maybe not. “We believe our estimate of x86 servers shipped into virtual environments growing from 21 percent in 2011 to 26 percent in 2013 could prove conservative,” Whitmore writes. “As a result, although we expect Romley to have a relatively muted impact on overall server unit demand, we do expect it to drive another leg of virtual machine growth.”

Hadoop, whose mascot is a cute cartoon elephant, is open source software based in part on a technique called MapReduce. Initially developed at Google, it makes big jobs involving the processing of large sets of data manageable. And while anyone can go get the open source software for free and put it to use, the number of start-up companies trying to build a business around helping other companies use Hadoop effectively is multiplying. A team of Hadoop engineers recently spun out of Yahoo as a start-up called Hortonworks, and another Hadoop outfit called MapR landed $20 million in venture capital funding in August.

To me, the best-known among the Hadoop start-ups is Cloudera. Backed by $36 million in investments from Accel Partners, Greylock Partners, Meritech Capital Partners and In-Q-Tel, Cloudera has probably got the biggest head start among the Hadoop companies. Its customers include eBay, Groupon and AOL.

Cloudera is also the company behind the Hadoop World conference that begins tomorrow in New York; as such, the eyes of the Hadoop — er, universe — will be paying attention to what goes on here.

The first bit of news is that Cloudera will be teaming up with the storage concern NetApp, which is announcing a turnkey product called the NetApp Open Solution for Hadoop. (One of these days people will dispense with using the word “solution” in this way. Alas, not yet!) Basically, the idea is to make Hadoop and Cloudera’s subscription support service easy to deploy from within NetApp storage hardware. NetApp will become a Cloudera reseller.

One problem companies deploying Hadoop often run into is the need for more storage, says Jeff O’Neal, senior director for data center solutions at NetApp. “When you deploy Hadoop in the traditional way, the ratio between computing power and storage is locked, and here we’re opening that up.”

Why pick Cloudera, when NetApp could have just as easily slapped on a freebie Hadoop installation and sold it alongside its own hardware? Speed. Cloudera, O’Neal says, can help customers get their Hadoop installations up and running faster than they otherwise would. “We can take weeks or even months out of the cycle of getting the infrastructure up and running,” O’Neal says.

The deal will also get Cloudera exposed to some new high-rolling customers where NetApp has some strengths, says Kirk Dunn, Cloudera’s COO. NetApp, for one thing, does a lot of business with federal government customers in the areas of defense and intelligence, and their data needs aren’t getting smaller. “The workloads are big. The velocity of data coming at both the compute and storage racks are significant,” Dunn says. So is the size of the data. Consider, for example how the military and intelligence community are creating more satellite imagery than ever before; then consider that all that data has to be sorted and analyzed in an efficient way. Outside of government, banking and financial institutions want to sift through the increasing stream of information on people and companies to determine risk.

The amount of data that companies are generating is huge. Five or six years ago, the average large corporation had maybe 360 terabytes of data lying around, Dunn says. Cloudera has some customers that are generating about that much new data nearly every day, he says, and it’s not slowing down. “The problems only get more vexing as time goes on. They sure aren’t getting any simpler,” he says. After years of helping those companies and governments store all that data, NetApp is uniquely positioned, Dunn says, to go back to those organizations and sell them on the idea of mining that data for useful information. “For NetApp, this is as basic as motherhood and apple pie.”

Hadoop is an open source technology known for its cute cartoon elephant mascot (hence the photo). It has its roots at Google and was inspired by MapReduce — one of the fundamental technologies that makes the Google search experience what it is — and was created at Yahoo, which donated it to the open source community by way of the Apache Software Foundation. That means it’s free.

It’s used by companies as varied as Facebook, Groupon and AOL to turn workloads involving huge sets of data into manageable tasks. It’s so popular, in fact, that several companies have sprung up hoping to turn a profit by helping other companies run Hadoop, in much the same way that Red Hat makes money by helping companies run Linux.

I’ve written here in the past about Cloudera, and Yahoo’s Hadoop team recently spun out as Hortonworks (again with the elephant references).

Now there’s another Hadoop company on the scene — MapR — and it has just secured a $20 million round of venture capital funding led by Redpoint Ventures, with Lightspeed Venture Partners and New Enterprise Associates also participating. This comes on top of a strategic relationship with storage giant EMC, in which the hardware maker is offering MapR’s Hadoop distribution with some of its systems.

So what does MapR aim to do? Create an industrial-strength version of Hadoop that’s ready for the enterprise. I talked with CEO John Schroeder. “We created a reliable and dependable platform that’s built for high availability so clusters don’t fail. And we also added data protection, so you can back up your data and recover to a point in time that works in large clusters,” he said.

MapR also tuned its version of Hadoop for speed. It’s not uncommon, he said, for MapR to run two to five times faster than other distributions on standard benchmark tests. As you might expect, faster is better. You can arrive at your analytical answers sooner, or run more workloads on larger data sets, or you can run the same ones on cheaper hardware. So Schroeder is only half kidding when he says it’s “cheaper than free.”

I talked with Satish Dharmaraj, a general partner at Redpoint, and asked him what he sees in MapR. The market for “big data,” he says, is real. “It’s pretty clear to us that the MapReduce method of crunching big sets of data is the easiest and most cost-efficient way of doing things, and it’s disrupting the analytics and software industry in how they process big sets of data.”

Dharmaraj also likes the team. Schroeder was previously CEO of Calista Technologies, which he sold to Microsoft, and before that, CEO of Rainfinity, now part of EMC. His co-founder and CTO is M.C. Srivas, who ran one of Google’s search infrastructure teams, and so has an intimate familiarity with the original MapReduce to which Hadoop is so closely related. Srivas was also chief architect at Spinnaker Networks, now part of NetApp; before that, he ran the engineering team at Transarc, now part of IBM.

Finally, Dharmaraj likes MapR’s approach. “Hadoop is great, but it’s an open source project, so there’s nobody really building all the things around it that an enterprise would need, like disaster recovery. It’s also really fast. Jobs that take 30 hours on other versions are taking five hours,” he said. “That, to us, makes this the first version of Hadoop for the enterprise.”

Shortly after my chat with Clark, ILM’s publicist Greg Grusby ushered me into the room, where, as you’ll hear, the roar of air conditioning units cooling all the machines makes it hard to hear much else.

The room is 10,500 square feet and contains the systems running all the things that you’d find in pretty much any other corporate data center for things like email and Web service. StarWars.com is hosted in the room, for example. But I was more interested in the machines used to produce the crazy cool visual effects. As Clark mentioned in our chat, ILM is using almost a full petabyte of storage–or nearly 1 million gigabytes–and for that it relies upon NetApp appliances.

I lingered over an older rack of machines nicknamed the Death Star. These are the old customized Racksaver servers, each containing a single AMD Athlon processor and 2 gigabytes of memory, that were used to render imagery for “Attack of the Clones” and “Revenge of the Sith.” They’re also now considered so old that it’s not cost-effective to run them any longer.

Then we saw the new machines: The IBM racks, which to me actually look like they belong on the Death Star, are a mix of LS22 servers with AMD processors and newer HS22‘s with Intel processors. They average 32GB of memory per blade and currently cranking away on several movies. If you’re among those eagerly awaiting the release of films like “Cowboys and Aliens,” “Pirates of the Caribbean 4,” “Super 8,” “Transformers 3,” “Battleship” and “The Avengers,” every blink of the lights on the Bladecenter brings them one step closer to completion.

We’re not done with the tours. Next up, I’ll take you on a walking tour of the Town of Dirt seen in the animated feature “Rango.” And before we’re done with all this, I’ll tell you what ILM considers its “secret weapon,” at least from a computing perspective. Enjoy the video.

(Image via Wookiepedia)

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110325/lucasfilms-data-center-and-an-encounter-with-the-real-death-star-video/feed/ 1 http://allthingsd.com/20110309/netapp-acquires-engenio-storage-business-from-lsi/ http://allthingsd.com/20110309/netapp-acquires-engenio-storage-business-from-lsi/#comments Wed, 09 Mar 2011 22:43:57 +0000 Arik Hesseldahl http://newenterprise.allthingsd.com/?p=3851 NetApp, the storage networking equipment concern, said today it had reached a deal to purchase the Engenio storage business from chipmaker LSI for $480 million in cash. The move will bolster its place in the market for video and high-performance computing applications. LSI’s Engenio unit makes rack-mountable storage devices, and generated $750 million in sales in 2010. LSI said it would use the proceeds to fund a $750 million share buyback. LSI shares soared by nearly four percent in after-hours trading. NetApp shares finished the regular session down 11 cents, and appeared to be held for after-hours trading pending the end of a conference call discussing the deal.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110309/netapp-acquires-engenio-storage-business-from-lsi/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20101231/it-trends-in-2011-and-beyond-more-cloud-flash-and-virtualization/ http://allthingsd.com/20101231/it-trends-in-2011-and-beyond-more-cloud-flash-and-virtualization/#comments Fri, 31 Dec 2010 18:38:13 +0000 Arik Hesseldahl http://newenterprise.allthingsd.com/?p=1288 Gleacher analyst Brian Marshall is out with a short research note this morning summarizing a few trends he thinks will be important in IT in 2011. Companies he covers, which include VMware, NetApp, EMC, IBM, Dell, Hewlett-Packard and Apple collectively saw their shares grow by 40 percent this year, beating the S&P 500, which grew 13 percent. With enterprise IT companies roughly six quarters into a recovery period following the disaster that was 2009, he says 2010 is going to prove to be a difficult year to follow.

For 2011, he expects a continuation of a lot of trends you’ve already been hearing about. You probably already knew about the direction of the general trends, but Marshall has included some interesting figures around the size of various opportunities.

Cloud computing, he says, currently consumes only two percent of the global enterprise storage budget today, and he expects that to grow to between 15 and 20 percent within five years.

He says solid-state storage–which uses flash memory to enhance storage in servers by breaking up the bottlenecks that exist between processors that do the number crunching and hard drives that store the data–is “at a nascent stage,” and that solid-state use in enterprise applications will only get more important in 2011.

Finally, expect more virtualization in the data center. Currently, corporations virtualize about 30 percent of their servers and storage machines. Marshall thinks over five years, that will grow to about 70 percent, and if the conditions are right, 2011 could be a year where the growth rate could accelerate significantly.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101231/it-trends-in-2011-and-beyond-more-cloud-flash-and-virtualization/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20101206/meet-lew-tucker-ciscos-mr-cloud/ http://allthingsd.com/20101206/meet-lew-tucker-ciscos-mr-cloud/#comments Mon, 06 Dec 2010 23:30:18 +0000 Arik Hesseldahl http://newenterprise.allthingsd.com/?p=189 Cisco Systems is serious about cloud computing. If today’s news about its strategic alliance with BMC Software doesn’t make that clear, talking with Lew Tucker, Cisco’s CTO for Cloud Computing certainly will.

Tucker is a 13-year veteran of Sun Microsystems whose last job was as Sun’s CTO of cloud computing. He was also VP of the AppExchange at Salesforce.com. He’s also known for “Lew’s Law,” which he describes as more of an informal observation about how far the cost of computing can realistically fall.

I caught up with him last week in New York City to talk about what Cisco, long the powerhouse of networking, plans to do in the cloud.

NewEnterprise: First off, what is Lew’s Law?

Lew Tucker: It’s just an observation, not a real law, that the price of computing will never be free, because it requires energy to compute. Computing is really about changing the state of physical bits, and that requires energy. It’s great that we’re driving the costs down. Moore’s Law is hammering the costs. But there is a lower limit. Right now the dominant cost is around managing software, operations and everything else. So we can take a lot of those costs out through automation.

NewEnterprise: When I think of Cisco I think of industrial-strength routers and switches. How do you get from there to cloud computing?

LT: Eight months ago I thought the same thing. I was with Sun for many years and then left to go to Salesforce.com to do software as a service. I became very enamored of the Salesforce model. I came back to Sun to build the Sun Cloud, which was to be a direct competitor to Amazon Web Services. I was an Amazon user myself and I loved how you could so easily spin up as many servers as you wanted without having to buy them, configure them and so on. Building a cloud is another thing entirely. When Cisco called me, I said to them, “You’re about routers and switches and I’m all about complex distributed computing systems.” And Cisco said they were really about networking and making distributed systems. I started digging into it and realized there was a really unique position at Cisco if you think of cloud computing as a fully automated system with different elements. Some of those are networking elements, and some of those are integrated boxes with computing and storage and networking all in one. Some are networking services.

NewEnterprise: When you think about how cloud computing works, you really can’t do anything without fast connections between one system or another, which is something that Cisco knows very well.

LT: The network has always been a shared piece of infrastructure. There are a lot of different applications running on different servers that are trying to reach either each other or their endpoints. So there’s an awful lot that’s going into the network to make that happen in a fair and efficient way.

NewEnterprise: So what hardware is Cisco building here?

LT: We build pre-integrated compute, storage and networking that we’re calling our Unified Computing Systems. You can buy a rack of these systems, and they’re driven by a set of APIs [application programming interfaces]. We’re not alone in that. Hewlett-Packard does something similar. Then the customers add in their own preferred storage environment, like EMC or NetApp, or they can build their own.

NewEnterprise: What kind of use cases are you seeing in companies? What are your customers asking for right now?

LT: Right now what they are asking about is collaboration services, the integration of video and voice and calendaring and messaging. We’ve seen consumer services like Facebook change what people expect at the office. We have a collaboration product called Quad that looks just like Facebook. WebEx is a Cisco service. We’re working on offering that as both a hosted form and one that runs inside the customer’s own environment.

NewEnterprise: So there are a lot of cloud providers out there already–Amazon, Google and Microsoft, which has its Azure platform. They’ve already deployed their services and have relationships with vendors. How do you see the market shaping up, and what is Cisco’s place in it?

LT: I think there’s going to be two or three large cloud providers, but then there will be many smaller ones who specialize in delivering specialized services. Take health care. In that industry, groups of companies are going to get together and offer a HIPAA-compliant cloud. You’ll also see something similar happen around financial services. Those are two industries that have very specific needs. The cloud will be dominated by a few large providers for sure, but there will also be many specialty cloud providers.

NewEnterprise: You’ve been on the job about six months. What have you learned so far?

LT: I’ve learned that there’s an amazing amount of technology within Cisco. It has the largest concentration of network engineers in the world. Part of my job is to go and align our products and roadmaps with this future world that we’re moving into and to uncover a lot of the new approaches to how we solve different networking problems. I’m an engineer, and I like nothing better than being in a room with a bunch of other engineers with a whiteboard as they all battle it out. I’ve also learned that building cloud infrastructure is a lot harder than everyone thought.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101206/meet-lew-tucker-ciscos-mr-cloud/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20101115/emc-to-buy-isilon-systems/ http://allthingsd.com/20101115/emc-to-buy-isilon-systems/#comments Mon, 15 Nov 2010 15:25:12 +0000 John Paczkowski http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/?p=52589 Another acquisition for EMC. The data storage technology supplier, which over the past five years has spent some $7 billion buying other companies, is reaching for its wallet once again. This morning, EMC announced plans to purchase Isilon Systems. Price: $33.85 a share in cash, or roughly $2.25 billion.

For EMC, the acquisition of Isilon gives it a stake in the network-attached storage space, a fast-growing market for “big data” storage (think movie studio catalogs and gene sequencing information) currently dominated by the likes of NetApp and the site of some other big acquisitions this year–Hewlett-Packard’s purchase of 3Par for $2.4 billion, for example. “The unmistakable waves of cloud computing and ‘big data’ are upon us,” EMC CEO Joe Tucci said in a statement. “Customers are looking for new ways to store, protect, secure and add intelligence to the vast amounts of information they will accumulate over the next decade.”

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101115/emc-to-buy-isilon-systems/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20100909/netapp-and-oracle-to-forget-about-forgotten-patent-suits/ http://allthingsd.com/20100909/netapp-and-oracle-to-forget-about-forgotten-patent-suits/#comments Thu, 09 Sep 2010 19:23:49 +0000 John Paczkowski http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/?p=48205 Hostilities between NetApp (NTAP) and Sun Microsystems, which was acquired by Oracle (ORCL) last year, have finally ended. This morning the two companies said they had agreed to dismiss their respective patent infringement lawsuits against each other, closing out a battle that began back in 2007. Neither company offered much in the way of comment on the deal, saying only that they “seek to have the lawsuits dismissed without prejudice” and that the terms of their agreement are confidential.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100909/netapp-and-oracle-to-forget-about-forgotten-patent-suits/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20090827/whats-up-with-isilon-systems/ http://allthingsd.com/20090827/whats-up-with-isilon-systems/#comments Thu, 27 Aug 2009 23:06:30 +0000 Eric Savitz http://voices.allthingsd.com/?p=14814 Big move today in Isilon Systems (ISLN): shares of the storage systems company have jumped $1.08, or 19.9 percent, to $6.49, on volume of more than 660,000 shares, or more than 4x the daily average. Today’s rise boosts the company’s three-day rally to 33 percent.

So, what’s going on here?

Well, here’s what I know.

Chris Blessington, the company’s senior VP of marketing and communications, notes in an interview with Tech Trader Daily that management has been on the road getting the word out to investors, press, analysts and customers about the company’s big push into the virtualization market, where it is taking on NetApp (NTAP). Blessington notes that the company was in New York on Monday and Tuesday talking to potential investors in a series of meetings arranged by Needham & Co.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090827/whats-up-with-isilon-systems/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20090826/the-new-guard-at-netapp/ http://allthingsd.com/20090826/the-new-guard-at-netapp/#comments Wed, 26 Aug 2009 07:41:28 +0000 Ben Worthen http://voices.allthingsd.com/?p=14747 Storage maker NetApp (NTAP) last week named Tom Georgens its chief executive. It was an orderly succession–Georgens was the company’s president and chief operating officer, and a board member since 2008–but as with any transition, the new executive will try to put his stamp on the company.

Georgens says that one of the things he will focus on is strengthening NetApp’s relationships with systems integrators, the consulting companies that recommend and install technology for customers.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090826/the-new-guard-at-netapp/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20090708/netapp-data-domain-end-merger-agreement/ http://allthingsd.com/20090708/netapp-data-domain-end-merger-agreement/#comments Wed, 08 Jul 2009 20:22:13 +0000 John Paczkowski http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/?p=20992 EMC has long claimed that its bid for Data Domain is clearly superior to NetApp’s, and today, NetApp finally agreed. After market close Wednesday afternoon, NetApp said it has terminated its merger agreement with Data Domain, giving the data storage technology vendor leave to accept EMC’s (EMC) unsolicited takeover bid–at $33.50 per share cash, an 11 percent premium over its own.

Which is exactly what Data Domain did.

One consolation: NetApp (NTAP) may have failed as a suitor, but it received a $57 million breakup fee from Data Domain (DDUP) as a result of the termination of the agreement.

Still, it’s a tough blow for NetApp (NTAP), which will now focus on “existing growth opportunities” instead of ill-starred bidding wars with rivals.

Said Dan Warmenhoven, NetApp’s chairman and CEO: “While NetApp’s acquisition of Data Domain would have produced benefits for customers and employees and complemented NetApp’s existing growth trajectory, we remain highly confident in our already compelling strategic plan, market opportunities, and competitive strengths.”

“NetApp applies a disciplined approach to acquisitions, one focused intently on creating long-term value for our stockholders.” Warmerhoven added. “We therefore cannot justify engaging in an increasingly expensive and dilutive bidding war that would diminish the deal’s strategic and financial benefits. NetApp has established leadership positions in virtualized infrastructure, storage efficiency, and unified storage, even in these difficult economic times, by helping customers meet their business objectives with less physical storage while reducing costs. That commitment will not change. We look forward to continuing to build on our foundation of innovation and customer service, and to continuing to execute our successful growth strategy.”

[Image credit: despair.com]

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090708/netapp-data-domain-end-merger-agreement/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20090708/new-from-google-google-windows/ http://allthingsd.com/20090708/new-from-google-google-windows/#comments Wed, 08 Jul 2009 19:00:46 +0000 John Paczkowski http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/?p=21033

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090708/new-from-google-google-windows/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20090707/boomtowns-favorite-leaked-yahoo-internal-memo-ever-new-pr-head-eric-brown-say-hello-and-more/ http://allthingsd.com/20090707/boomtowns-favorite-leaked-yahoo-internal-memo-ever-new-pr-head-eric-brown-say-hello-and-more/#comments Wed, 08 Jul 2009 00:52:28 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=15491

BoomTown has had some good leaked internal memos from Yahoo, but I have never enjoyed one quite as much as this one from newly installed Yahoo PR head Eric Brown, who started today.

While it is clear that Yahoo (YHOO) has had its troubles in understanding and offering social-networking products to its users, Brown certainly knows how to share.

Yahoo could use some of that DNA!

New Yahoo CMO Elisa Steele named Brown, a colleague from her former job at NetApp (NTAP), as SVP of global communications at the Internet giant in June.

He was the VP of corporate relations at the data storage company, on whose board Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz has also served. Before that, he was at Adaptec (ADPT).

Brown is filling a slot left when former Yahoo PR head Jill Nash left Yahoo in February. She was briefly replaced by her deputy, Brad Williams, who was laid off from Yahoo in a recent round of cuts.

Like Steele, he is yet another executive from the business software arena to be hired under Bartz, who also comes from that background. Bartz also hired Jeff Russakow from Symantec (SYMC), which makes antivirus software and other security, for the post of Customer Advocacy SVP.

Yahoo’s whole marketing organization is undergoing a rejiggering under Steele, including a major brand overhaul. Along with Brown, she also recently hired Penny Baldwin as SVP of global integrated marketing and brand management.

Brown will be taking on Yahoo’s image-making, a task that has been a challenge over the last two years as the Silicon Valley icon has been buffeted by a series of external and internal challenges.

But Bartz has publicly talked about the need to now focus attention on Yahoo’s many assets and strengths.

In fact, in an onstage interview with me at the seventh D: All Things Digital conference in late May, Bartz said: “The best way to change the perception is to do a good job and then talk about it.”

From this memo, Brown seems like he knows how to do that.

And since he likes writers Kate Chopin and David Sedaris at the same time, it is obvious that Brown and I are on the path to become besties.

(Potential deal-breaker: I like piña coladas and getting caught in the rain.)

Here’s the memo–based on a form that sources tell me all Yahoo PR folks fill out in a getting-to-know-you questionnaire, but don’t make public–in which Brown says hello to his new team:

From: Eric Brown (SVP Global Communications)
Sent: Monday, July 06, 2009 6:00 PM
Subject: It’s great to be here!

Global comms team,

Thank you so much for the wonderful intro materials you gave me. I’m going to spend quite a bit of time on the org charts, budgets, plans, and results package you compiled for me. But I’ve been especially thrilled with the personal profiles you sent my way. I’ve seen other people whose phobias are the same as mine: spiders and heights; enjoyed how many of you put Paris as your favorite place on Earth; and am impressed with how many amazing books this group has collectively read.

I must also admit to being slightly intimidated by all of you who put “bad grammar” as a pet peeve and will triple check this email to avoid any grammar infractions…

I know I have a Thursday group meeting with you, but thought the least I could do on day one is return the favor and complete my own handbook profile. So here goes…

Date I joined Yahoo!: today (6 July 2009), though I did spend two days at the senior leaders meeting in mid-June and thank all of you who were there for the warm welcome in Half Moon Bay.

What I do here: lead a team of amazing, intelligent, motivated people who put Yahoo! in the best light possible and tell our story in compelling ways that make users and advertisers around the world want to embrace Yahoo! heartily.

Where I grew up: Warsaw, Virginia–a tiny town about 90 minutes from Richmond, Virginia and 150 minutes from Washington, D.C. For those of you who are American history buffs, Warsaw is about 10 minutes from the birthplace of Robert E. Lee and 15 minutes from the birthplace of George Washington.

Where I live now: Sunnyvale, California. Can’t beat the commute.

College: William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia. BA in English. Loved lit crit. Senior honors thesis was on post-WWII masculinity in American society as represented by the works of Norman Mailer.

My first job: an internship for the U.S. Navy (my parents’ employer—they were civilians) analyzing different process flow diagram software packages for a team creating warship defense systems. For the rest of high school and college, I had LOTS more fun as a waiter at dive restaurant called The Stagecoach. The food was ghastly; the people were amazing.

What I did before Yahoo!: I ran comms (PR, social media, internal comms, and exec comms) for NetApp, managing a global team of about 60+ people doing amazing enterprise and B2B work in 30+ companies worldwide. I’m very excited to learn “consumer” from all of you–and equally excited to share experiences from my almost 20 years in the business in return.

What I do when I’m not here: I love travel (had a super 3 days in the Blue Mountains outside Sydney two weekends ago), cooking (yes, seriously—cooking is very therapeutic and relaxing for me), and reading (though I haven’t picked up a Norman Mailer since my undergrad days).

If the Internet didn’t exist, what I’d be doing right now: teaching literature to high school students. I believe that at some point in my life, I have to return to society what it has given me. And I’d be a better teacher than firefighter or doctor!

Favorite place on Earth: Paris. I try to go there 3 or 4 times a year and have a couple of very close friends who are kind enough to let me crash with them. Second favorite is Hong Kong.

Proudest accomplishment: professionally–being part of the “inner counsel circle” for NetApp execs on a variety of comms and marketing issues (which I hope to be here at Yahoo! as well); personally–being a good friend, partner, and family member.

Favorite Yahoo! moment: there have only been 3 days of them so far—and all have been great. I felt very honored and lucky to be part of the Half Moon Bay leadership summit–and meeting people from all over Yahoo! there was inspiring.

Favorite book: someone who majored in literature can’t just name one, so I’ll split them into categories…Favorite works of literature: The Scarlet Letter by Hawthorne, The Awakening by Kate Chopin, and To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee. Favorite work that kindled my imagination: The Hobbit by Tolkien. Favorite works that make me laugh: anything by David Sedaris (the man is wicked funny).

Favorite movie: two–Moulin Rouge and Orlando–both visually stunning.

My first car: a Buick Skyhawk in a horrible shade of brown–the thing was so ratty that I had to add oil to it every other day so it wouldn’t break down–it made its last hurrah on a cross-country trip from Virginia to California and made it over the Rocky Mountains without any issues but then was quite unhappy crossing the Sierra Nevada range.

My next vacation destination: somehow I think I’m going to be very busy for the next few months so I’m not planning any big trips, though I have told a friend I’ll attend his 50th birthday party in Munich and from there I’ll try to drive to Vienna for a few days.

My hidden talent: navigating subway systems when everyone else insists on taking a taxi (the exception: Tokyo–because it is just too darned crowded).

My favorite online video: I like online videos to catch up on things that MTV no longer carries–like videos from Gus Gus (though I only see one of their videos on Yahoo! Music…)

My guiltiest pleasure: ice cream in bed with the Kindle (yes, just as Elisa put in her email)–the ice cream HAS to be Ben & Jerry’s (LOVE being on this floor with the conference room names!) and my favorite is Peach Cobbler.

I have an intense fear of: spiders and heights–I even had a spider vacuum for a while so I didn’t have to come near ‘em or smash ‘em–but then I was scared they’d survive the suction and electric shock and crawl back somewhere–so now they’re routinely smashed.

My biggest pet peeve: beating around the bush–tell me what you want me to know because I’m not telepathic and say it without a lot of metaphor or subtlety–if you really want me to know something, please make it crystal clear.

My best celebrity encounter: dinner with friends in the outdoor section of the Restaurant du Palais Royal in Paris on a gorgeous May evening–next to us was Tom Ford (at the height of his Gucci power)–I have never wanted to NOT eat so much in my life.

Something few people know about me: I abhor cava (sorry to those of you in Spain)–champagne is my favorite drink on Earth, prosecco will do in a pinch, and New World sparklings are hit and miss–but I universally detest cava.

Best for advice for working with me (yes, a little changed from what you all submitted): honesty really IS the best policy–unless I’m having a bad hair day in which case please just don’t say anything about that at all.

Thanks again for having me here–and we’ll speak more on Thursday.

Best regards,
Eric

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090707/boomtowns-favorite-leaked-yahoo-internal-memo-ever-new-pr-head-eric-brown-say-hello-and-more/feed/ 1 http://allthingsd.com/20090706/emc-makes-data-domain-an-offer-it-cant-refuse/ http://allthingsd.com/20090706/emc-makes-data-domain-an-offer-it-cant-refuse/#comments Mon, 06 Jul 2009 15:33:54 +0000 John Paczkowski http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/?p=20731 NetApp has cleared all necessary U.S. regulatory hurdles to proceed with its acquisition of Data Domain, though it seems unlikely that the company will prevail now that rival EMC has trumped its bid for the storage vendor.

This morning, EMC raised its offer for Data Domain to $2.1 billion from $1.8 billion, an 11 percent increase over its previous all-cash bid. Data Domain’s board had previously recommended that shareholders reject EMC’s $30-a-share cash bid in favor of a $30 cash-and-stock offer from NetApp (NTAP).

Hard to see the board doing so again now that the EMC (EMC) has sweetened the financial end of its proposal and removed some deal-protection provisions with which Data Domain (DDUP) had taken issue. With those gone, EMC’s bid is clearly superior to NetApp’s, CEO Joe Tucci claims, and it would be hard to argue otherwise.

“Over the past several weeks we’ve received strong support from many Data Domain stockholders and customers, validating our belief that EMC is Data Domain’s best choice,” Tucci wrote in a letter to Data Domain’s leadership. “With regulatory requirements now fulfilled, and in light of the clearly superior proposal we submitted to Data Domain’s Board of Directors today, we expect Data Domain to sign our definitive agreement that will deliver superior value in cash to the Data Domain stockholders in as little as two weeks.”

Data Domain has until midnight on July 17 to accept the offer.

UPDATE: NetApp responded to EMC’s announcement with the following statement:

“In response to EMC’s revised, unsolicited offer, the NetApp Board of Directors will carefully weigh its options, keeping in mind both its fiduciary duty to its stockholders and its disciplined acquisition strategy. We will provide an update shortly.”

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090706/emc-makes-data-domain-an-offer-it-cant-refuse/feed/ 3