Enterprise Storage Group Inc. analyst Steve Duplessie agrees that the platform's flexibility should make it attractive. "The place where they're playing has been massively overlooked," he says. [Ed. note: is "massive overlooking" possible? Just axin'.] He adds that Troika's device sits outside the data path, so the risk of deploying it is less than it would be for an intelligent SAN switch.
While the industry will ultimately move toward the IP vision Cisco encompasses, says Duplessie, there are still many legacy Fibre Channel SANs out there, and companies don't want to just throw them away. "They need to go get the software guys to understand that they can wait two years to put their stuff on Cisco, or they can put it on [Troika's] platform today," he says.
Terrell wouldn't comment on how many employees Troika currently has (in early April, Byte and Switch reported that Troika had about 70 employees), or on what percentage of the company's staff is comprised of engineers. "We're right-sized today," he says, admitting that the company has gone through its share of layoffs over the past year. He says the latest round of funding could spur "a modest amount of [headcount] growth."
Will this latest -- and, the company claims, final -- round of $13 million be money well spent? Let's hope Troika's second run at the storage networking market fares better than its first.
Eugénie Larson, Reporter, Byte and Switch
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