The platform is Troika's second shot at making it big in the storage networking market. Its first attempt, which involved building SCSI-to-Fibre Channel host bus adapter software, ended in a $10.5 million fire sale of the product's intellectual property rights to JNI Corp. (Nasdaq: JNIC) (see JNI Buys Troika's HBA Software).
Terrell says the company's focus now is on the soon-to-be unveiled storage networking device, which Troika claims combines the scaleability of an intelligent switch with the software functionality of an appliance. The company says the product, which is still in the pre-beta stage, will enable customers to nondisruptively move storage applications like volume management, migration, mirroring, snapshots, copy services, and asynchronous replication, into the network. A single device also apparently has the ability to host multiple and disparate applications at the same time, according to Troika [ed. note: not to be confused with Troika Entertainment, producers of Cats, the longest-running frightful musical in Broadway history].
That may well be, but there's still the very real question of how well the new platform will actually work, as the product isn't even in beta yet. Then Troika will have to prove it can stand up against the host of intelligent switch providers in the market, which include Brocade Communications Systems Inc. (Nasdaq: BRCD), Candera Inc., Cisco Systems Inc. (Nasdaq: CSCO), Maranti Networks, MaXXan Systems Inc., Sun Microsystems Inc. (Nasdaq: SUNW), and Sanera Systems Inc.
Terrell says he's not worried. The flexibility of the platform will not only override doubts connected with its novelty, he says, but could also turn would-be competitors into customers.
"It's not, strictly speaking, a switch. It has storage-array-like ports," he says, claiming that this allows customers to integrate it into any existing Fibre Channel fabrics and with any of their existing SAN switches. "The platform is very friendly to legacy installations... It doesn't have the compliance constraints of the fabric switch."
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