Date: Fri, 1 Jun 2001 01:32:46 -0700 From: "Ted Mittelstaedt" <tedm@toybox.placo.com> To: "peter kok" <aoypcc@hotmail.com>, <freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG> Subject: RE: comment from InfoStor Current Articles Message-ID: <005101c0ea75$6f7fe5e0$1401a8c0@tedm.placo.com> In-Reply-To: <F211Ed28kIN4MmXKCnz00000677@hotmail.com>
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Remember that the NAS is where the Network Computer was several years ago. At one time all the industry pundits were saying that NC's were going to be purchased in droves and that the NC business was going to be worth billions and billions, etc. Those rosy predictions never came true. Today, the NAS is just the latest fad to come down the pike. The vendors that are selling them are either hard drive manufacturers or PC manufacturers. The hard drive people look on them as a product that is an easy sell into their channels that are already purchasing disk drives, with a hefty profit margin, far, far greater than the margins on hard drives. The PC people look on them as a way of sticking a regular PC motherboard into a fancy case, and throwing NT on it and calling it a fancy name and getting 6 times the money for it than for a regular PC server. (which is made from the same parts as the NAS and does exactly the same thing) If a NAS is truly designed as an appliance with just a web interface to run it, then it really doesen't matter what operating system it runs under, the user will never interact with the OS. I think that this article is indicating that the NAS vendors are working to make their products look more and more like rack-mounted 2U servers, and less and less like appliances. As they get further and further from the appliance model then of course what operating system the device runs becomes more and more important, which is why they are using NT. But, as they do this they also get closer and closer to the server-on-a-PC model and eventually after doing this long enough, there's no difference between a NAS and a pc-on-a-server and then the customers start thinking "why should I spend 5 times what a pc-on-a-server costs for a NAS when I can just buy a PC on a server?" and stop buying NAS's and then the NAS vapormarket gets flushed down the same toilet that the NC vapormarket got flushed down. Ted Mittelstaedt tedm@toybox.placo.com Author of: The FreeBSD Corporate Networker's Guide Book website: http://www.freebsd-corp-net-guide.com >-----Original Message----- >From: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG >[mailto:owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG]On Behalf Of peter kok >Sent: Thursday, May 31, 2001 8:35 AM >To: freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG >Subject: comment from InfoStor Current Articles > > >http://is.pennnet.com/Articles/Article_Display.cfm?Section=Articles &Subsection=Display&ARTICLE_ID=101424&KEYWORD=microsoft > >What do you think? >_________________________________________________________________________ >Get Your Private, Free E-mail from MSN Hotmail at http://www.hotmail.com. > > >To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org >with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message > To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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