Storage adapter and software producer JNI Corp. will announce today exclusive licensing of related technology from startup Troika Networks Inc.
San Diego-based JNI will get, for $10.5 million, Troikas Zentai Controller and Path Command Plus products, plus existing customer support. Zentai, like JNIs own products, is a PCI-to-Fibre Channel card, but with advanced high-availability features for Microsoft Corp.s Windows operating systems. Path Command Plus is similar software for storage area networks and also has high-availability functions, an area that JNI officials said the company has been trying to expand into.
EMC Corp. and Veritas Software Corp. have similar software in their stables, but other than price differences and JNI having its own controllers part of the host-bus adapter, the distinctions are in functionality, said Darryll Smith, the companys manager of network management products. The acquisition will help JNI build better RAID failure detection, automated reconfiguring of target device states, and features for failover, failback and load balancing, he said.
Those features will be live later this year and will come with a three-year warranty, compared with the 13-month warranty Troika had, he said. Separately, JNI plans to continue developing 2G-bit products and InfiniBand products, officials said.
Separately, JNI plans to continue developing 2G-bit products and InfiniBand products, officials said.
For Troika, a 90-person Westlake Village, Calif., company, the deal signifies its exit from the adapter area, where the most noteworthy customer was Hitachi Data Systems, a Santa Clara, Calif., division of Tokyos Hitachi Ltd. But the deal with JNI was made with HDS blessing, and Troika will now focus on storage services technology, a spokeswoman said.
“I think its a great partnership,” said analyst Eric Sheppard, of International Data Corp. in Framingham, Mass. Because of co-branding, the deal will help Troika spread its name to JNIs larger and higher-end customer pool, while JNI expands beyond the Unix market into the high-end Windows market. The new warranty is particularly impressive, Sheppard said.
