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Maranti Scores $25 Million

Storage startup Maranti Networks
plans to announce $25 million in new funding next week, Byte and Switch has learned. The new round brings Maranti's total equity investment to $31 million since it was founded in October 2000.

Menlo Ventures
and Trinity Ventures are leading this round of investment, along with Alliance Ventures, the company that put up $6 million for Marantis first funding round.

Maranti says the money will be used to roll out its product in the second half of 2002, with general availability by the end of that year. The company is aggressively hiring additions to its roster of about 60 employees to meet this schedule.

This begs the big question: What exactly is its product?

Co-founder and VP of marketing Harish Nayak blames “competition reasons” for the company’s unwillingness to spill the beans. But last Byte and Switch heard, Maranti was developing a humongous multiprotocol SAN switch with more than 400 ports (see Maranti Makes a Monster). That's more than four times the size of the megaswitch said to be in development at Andiamo Systems Inc., the spin-in SAN startup founded by Cisco Systems Inc. (Nasdaq: CSCO) (see Cisco’s Secret SAN Strategies Revealed and Cisco Spills Beans on Next SAN Router).

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