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Startup: 'Shut Up!'

Most storage networking startups hungrily pursue publicity. Confluence Networks, a company building a switch in one of the hottest sectors of the storage market, is taking the opposite tack and appears determined to stay out of the public eye.

Mark Davis, the company's new senior VP of marketing, emailed Byte and Switch today:

    "What, pray tell, could you possibly write about Confluence? I assure you that any sources you think you have, don't know anything about what we're doing... If you want to go ahead, please be my guest."

Thanks Mark. Don't mind if we do.

Confluence's Website says it is building: "...innovative, world-class networked storage solutions." Venture Economics, a Thompson Financial company, and a leading source of data on newly funded private companies, is more specific: It says Confluence Networks is building a multiprotocol, terabit switch with Sonet/SDH and wavelength switching capabilities.

A switch with these features is most likely to be used to connect storage devices within large data-centers over optical wide-area and metropolitan networks for backup and disaster recovery services -- a market expected to be worth billions of dollars within the next few years.

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