Top Ten Private Storage Networking Companies: Page 7 of 26

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.