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Pirus Scores Another $27 Million: Page 2 of 2

"Our proposition is very broad... Our switch will be very dense and carrier class, with NEBS compliance," Napolitano says.

Analysts who've been briefed by Pirus management say the startup's picked a good spot. According to William Hurley, program manager at The Yankee Group, Pirus will compete with the likes of DataDirect Networks, which also makes a box designed to link network servers with storage servers. "These vendors portend the future look of storage communications, integrating a variety of network interfaces with strong support for Fibre Channel, SCSI, and IP-based storage over glass" he asserts.

Hurley says Pirus also will compete with Cereva Networks Inc. (see Cereva Details Storage Switch). But unlike Cereva, Pirus will link to a range of different vendors' storage units, while Cereva will link to its own. The tradeoff, Hurley says, will be that Pirus may not offer as granular control over storage devices -- even though it will support the devices that may already be in place in a carrier's network.

Besides Napolitano, Pirus's management includes Rich Corley, executive VP and founder, previously with Nortel Networks Corp. (NYSE/Toronto: NT), Arris Interactive, and Chipcom; Doug Wood, VP of engineering, formerly of the multimedia internetworking group at Lucent Technologies Inc. (NYSE: LU), as well as Xyplex; Mark Lovington, VP of marketing, formerly of Lucent and Xyplex; and Milan Merhar, chief scientist, formerly of Lucent. Merhar is active on a variety of IP storage standards efforts, including the iSCSI effort at the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF).

-- Mary Jander, Senior Editor, Light Reading http://www.lightreading.com