New Players, Wares Enter Storage Fray

Some of the storage industrys new kids on the block are building products on IP storage as well as NAS and SAN convergence, technologies that challenge more traditional storage methods.

Officially launched last week, Pirus Networks Inc., of Acton, Mass., has developed a family of switches that can handle block-level and file-level transfers. The first model of Pirus new switches, the PSX1000, will perform network-attached storage and storage area network functions and will support Fibre Channel, iSCSI and Ethernet protocols.

LeftHand Networks Inc., of Boulder, Colo., which is basing its product mission on a network-centric architecture called Network Unified Storage, is scheduled to announce its new products next quarter.

Pirus switches, available for beta testing this quarter, are compatible with products from other vendors, including Brocade Communications Systems Inc., McData Corp., Vixel Corp. and QLogic Corp., according to the company.

LeftHand and Pirus are two of more than a dozen new players coming into the data storage market.

William Hurley, program manager at The Yankee Group, in Boston, argued against calling Pirus product a switch because it does a variety of tasks that include disk management and data pooling through virtualization and security. “It works more like a traditional storage platform. … I would call it a robust storage communication element that has switch attributes,” Hurley said.