wHAT'S this all about? Is this a threat to EMC?Nishan Systems to Revolutionize
Storage Area Networking
Computer Industry Giants Join Leading
Venture Capitalists to Back Start-Up's
Storage over IP (SoIP©) Plans
San Jose, Calif.-May 22, 2000- Nishan Systems today announced that it will revolutionize the Storage Area Networking (SAN) market, by creating a complete end-to-end solution based on the proven networking standards IP and Gigabit Ethernet. Nishan and its partners will introduce Storage over IP? (SoIP), which combines the best features of today's first-generation SANs?high availability and performance?with the best features of IP networks?product compatibility, established standards, and scalability.
Nishan also announced that it has signed investment agreements with a number of the world's leading storage and computer companies. These investments bring Nishan's total funding from leading corporations and venture capital institutions to over $40 million. Prior rounds of financing came from premier technology venture capitalists, including Altos Ventures, ComVentures, Discovery Ventures, Raza Ventures, Sofinnova Ventures, and Weiss, Peck & Greer Venture Partners.
SoIP will leverage the unprecedented improvements in the IP infrastructure itself and provide vendor interoperability, an unrealized goal that continues to plague current SAN offerings. In addition to serving the traditional enterprise and service provider customer segments, SoIP also will help develop an entirely new type of service?online storage.
"Every once in a while, a company has an idea that changes an entire industry," said Aamer Latif, president and CEO of Nishan Systems. "SoIP is an idea that will completely transform the storage networking industry. By integrating storage with IP, Nishan and the other SoIP companies will allow enterprises and service providers to use their expertise in designing and managing IP networks to solve the exploding storage access problem. Until now, widespread SAN adoption has been curtailed by proprietary implementations. With the advent of SoIP, we and our partners will enable the broad deployment of SANs."
While the SAN market is projected to reach $2.8 billion (Source: IDC for 2003), a recent Enterprise Management Associates report showed that nearly half of the IT managers surveyed were not planning to implement SANs, with many citing a lack of standards as a serious problem. SoIP leverages existing standards, including native IP and Gigabit Ethernet, to break down the barriers to widespread SAN deployment, and enable the SAN market to reach its full potential.
In addition to investing in Nishan to create an end-to-end SoIP solution, the company's partners will provide extensive applications experience and features validation. The companies backing Nishan represent over $150B in revenues, and have customer relationships with virtually every major enterprise and service provider.
World-Class Management and Technology Teams
Nishan brings together world-class management and technical expertise from the data networking, storage networking, ASIC, and storage industries. Nishan's management and board members bring executive experience from the leading high-technology companies, including Cisco Systems, 3Com, Hewlett-Packard, Amati Communications, Toshiba, and AMD.
The Definitive Convergence
of Storage and Networking
Nishan Systems Launches
Storage over Internet Protocol (SoIP©)
Business
Nishan Systems is developing a new class of storage networking products that employs proven, open standards to connect storage devices and servers. Along with our strategic partners, we will offer fully interoperable products that allow organizations to access and share stored data in a high-performance, manageable, and scalable Storage Area Network (SAN). And, since our products are based on the worldwide standards Internet Protocol (IP) and Gigabit Ethernet, they are fully compatible with the millions of routers and switches that already have been installed, proven, and mastered by information technology professionals. Our products employ Storage over IP? (SoIP) to reduce the total cost of ownership of data storage networks, while improving application efficiency, performance, and accessibility.
Mission
Nishan Systems will be the primary supplier of standards-based, high-performance storage networking systems for the new SoIP infrastructure.
Market
With today's ever-increasing reliance on instantly available data, SANs are becoming essential for providing unparalleled levels of accessibility to huge volumes of stored information. Industry watchers, such as IDC, predict that the worldwide sales of SAN products will grow from $500M this year to $2.8B in 2003. Despite that impressive growth, however, widespread adoption of SANs is being impeded by product incompatibility, a lack of stable standards, and reluctance by organizations to undertake the costly and risky deployment of an entirely new and unfamiliar technology. SANs today are based on Fibre Channel fabric switching, which is one of the last remaining closed network architectures. But that is about to change.
IP Infrastructure Convergence
Based on open IP infrastructure elements, new technologies are emerging that will allow SANs to realize their true potential and become the de facto standard for connecting storage systems and devices. Not only will the proliferation of high-speed switches, routers, and fiber-optic cable allow the global IP infrastructure to support an unimaginable volume of data; the IP infrastructure also is becoming reliable, manageable, and secure enough to handle mission-critical information, such as storage data.
Nishan and our partners share the vision of using the converging IP infrastructure to carry storage data along with other forms of data and voice traffic, and are designing innovative products to provide that additional degree of network convergence. Recent breakthroughs in higher-speed Ethernet, switching fabrics, bandwidth management, and protocols such as MPLS (Multi Protocol Label Switching) are enabling the realization of products that can deliver Storage over IP (SoIP).
Nishan's SoIP-based products will combine the best features of today's SANs?high availability and performance?with the best features of IP networks?product compatibility, proven standards, familiar technology, and network scalability. SoIP breaks down the barriers to SAN deployment, and enables the widespread adoption of SANs by IT professionals worldwide. SoIP also will help spawn a whole new class of service providers that offer distributed online storage.
Products
Nishan Systems will offer a complete end-to-end SAN solution that is based on proven industry standards, such as IP, Gigabit Ethernet, OSPF, MPLS, LDAP, and SNMP. Traditional storage system interfaces, including SCSI (Small Computer Systems Interface), Fibre Channel, and FC-AL (Fibre Channel - Arbitrated Loop), along with the forthcoming InfiniBand? interface, will be connected to the standard IP infrastructure via SoIP. Native Gigabit Ethernet SoIP adapters, followed by 10-Gigabit Ethernet SoIP adapters, will also be available for direct connection to the SoIP-based SANs.
What does Nishan mean?
Nishan is an Urdu word that means mark or impact, as in make your mark or have a lasting impact. It represents what we have collectively set out to accomplish with our technology and company. |
