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Ann Bednarz Company name: Symbolic of the strength and resilience of the Maranti tree, which grows in southeast Asia. Origin: Founded in October 2000 by Kuldeep Sandhu, former vice president of engineering at Efficient Networks; Santosh Lolayekar, former Cisco engineer; and Harish Nayak, former executive at TCP/IP stack vendor iReady. Funding: a $25 million second round closed in December 2001, bringing the total to $31 million. Key investors: Alliance Ventures, Menlo Ventures and Trinity Ventures. CEO: Kuldeep Sandhu Product: Unnamed application-aware storage networking platform. Maranti wants to do for storage networks what application-aware switches do for data networks: prioritize service levels. The San Jose company is building a storage-switching infrastructure that's capable of differentiating between high- and low-priority applications and tailoring service accordingly. For example, an order-management system might get transaction priority over an e-mail application.
Customer trials and a formal product launch are planned for this summer, with product availability late in the year. Meanwhile, competition is mounting from storage incumbents Brocade Communications, Inrange Technologies and McData, and from start-ups such as Cisco-backed Andiamo Systems and Sanera Systems.
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Users define storage service policies for multiple applications
that access disparate storage resources, including direct- and network-attached
storage and storage-area networks. The switch will connect to servers via
Gigabit Ethernet and to storage subsystems through Fibre Channel and iSCSI
blades. Each port will have its own virtualization engine. Industry observers
expect ports to number in the hundreds, but Maranti isn't saying yet.
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