Malachite has already received seed and first-round funding of around $10 million from Oak Hill Venture Partners and Fluid Ventures.
So why all the attention? Surely there are enough switch makers out there building next-generation hardware and software products for the data center?
No there arent, and not like this, says Welts. The data center has been pretty much ignored from a storage networking perspective storage has been purpose-built, proprietary, and for specific applications only, and the Layer 2/3 switch makers have yet to even notice it. He says Malachites switch will connect real-time applications, multimedia, Oracle Corp. (Nasdaq: ORCL) databases... whatever you care to plug into it, to provide disaster recovery and backup solutions across an optical network.
However, Malachites not the first to recognize the potential for connecting data centers and storage backup systems via optical networks -- a market Infonetics Research Inc. predicts will be worth $14.8 billion by 2007.
Nortel Networks Corp. (NYSE/Toronto: NT) also has its eye on this market (see Nortel Lights Up Storage Networks) as does McData Corp.
(see McData Goes for GiantLoop), Entrada Networks (Nasdaq: ESAN), ADVA AG Optical Networking (Neuer Markt: ADV), Storage Computer Inc. (Nasdaq: SOS), and a number of others.
Bob Friday, Chief AI Officer for Juniper Networks, explains how the advanced technology is transforming operations.
Contact center leaders from 8x8, Awaken Intelligence, and 360insight discuss the importance of agent experience.
AI may force enterprises to rewire parts of their data centers so they are fully optimized to run such workloads. The question is do you use Ethernet or InfiniBand?
