TrueSAN Starts Over With Storage Management Tool

Recognizing the error of its old thinking, TrueSAN Networks Inc. will essentially relaunch on Monday with new storage management software called Cloudbreak, President and CEO Tom Isakovich said on Friday.

The San Jose, Calif., company originally sold RAID hardware in 1999 and began selling storage-area networking products in 2000, but stopped a few months ago.

"It was customer feedback that ultimately drove our decision to go 100 percent software," Isakovich said.

He said Cloudbreak is network-based software with four parts: network and device management; virtualization; resource management; and business continuance. The solution uses its own servers and a Java management interface.

"Were taking a platform approach to storage management, not the utility approach," he said.

Too many of the competitions products only solve parts of the enterprise management problem, he said.

TrueSAN will enter beta testing with four large enterprises in late February or early March, Isakovich said. The product should be for sale by the summer, starting at about $25,000 per terabyte, he said.

"Were not at all going into the customers and saying, You dont need [EMC Corp.s] ControlCenter anymore, or, Kill SRDF [Symmetrix Remote Data Facility]," he said.

But, he said, "things are moving" for getting EMCs and other major hardware vendors APIs for Cloudbreaks use. An announcement could come in about two weeks, he said.

Isakovich, who also founded the company, also spoke of his future plans.

"Over time, were going to do more and more application-side integration, and more and more disk," he said.

TrueSANs also considering policy management, expert analysis tools, more operating system support and possibly a "light" version of Cloudbreak, he said.

Bob Passmore, an analyst with Gartner Group Inc., in Framingham, Mass., thinks TrueSAN has a better chance at success than other startups. The company, he said, "has shown significant vision and timeliness around the concepts of expanding SANs and SAN management." Also, he said, "I think that TrueSAN has picked a path that gives it more opportunity than many of the startups Ive looked at. But it is not a totally unique path."

The bottom line: "Like all startups, they have to prove themselves," Passmore said, noting that "success" could be a buyout from a bigger company or the signing of OEM customers.

Qlogic Corp., of Aliso Viejo, Calif., which makes switches, host-bus adapters and other storage products, is a partial investor in the company.