Top Ten Private Storage Networking Companies
Posted by
byteandswitch.com
June 13, 2001
TrueSAN’s VP of engineering, Paul von Stamwitz, has 20 years experience in IP networking – from Adaptec Inc. (Nasdaq: ADPT) among others – and is seen as a “pioneer” of IP storage. (He's said to wear a coonskin hat.) The equally Teutonic-sounding COO, Mark Birnkrant, has 16 years behind him in the storage industry, a large chunk of it spent as head of NEC Corp.’s (Nasdaq: NIPNY) storage unit (see SAN Startup Fills Positions).
TrueSAN's product, Paladin, is based on a SAN switch fabric built right into a server that supports distributed parallel processing. This approach, the company claims, delivers an order-of-magnitude better capacity and performance than competing solutions from
EMC Corp. (NYSE: EMC) and Network Appliance Inc. (Nasdaq: NTAP).
It also allows TrueSAN to support network-attached storage applications, as well as SANs. And it's scaleable: Customers pay for processors in add-on increments – as many as 128 can be supported in one platform. The switch fabric isn’t the company’s own; it’s using QLogic Corp.’s (Nasdaq: QLGC) SANbox 8- and 16-port Fibre Channel switches. (see Startups Ready Big SAN Switches ).
Paladin will go head-to-head with a similar product from Cereva Networks Inc., but is further ahead, in that it's shipping now (see Cereva Details Storage Switch).
“TrueSAN clearly has the first-mover advantage in carrier scale storage,” says William Hurley at The Yankee Group.
