Maranti: A start-up to watch

Error 404--Not Found

From RFC 2068 Hypertext Transfer Protocol -- HTTP/1.1:

10.4.5 404 Not Found

The server has not found anything matching the Request-URI. No indication is given of whether the condition is temporary or permanent.

If the server does not wish to make this information available to the client, the status code 403 (Forbidden) can be used instead. The 410 (Gone) status code SHOULD be used if the server knows, through some internally configurable mechanism, that an old resource is permanently unavailable and has no forwarding address.

Error 404--Not Found

From RFC 2068 Hypertext Transfer Protocol -- HTTP/1.1:

10.4.5 404 Not Found

The server has not found anything matching the Request-URI. No indication is given of whether the condition is temporary or permanent.

By Ann Bednarz
Network World, 04/29/02

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Company name: Symbolic of the strength and resilience of the Maranti tree, which grows in southeast Asia.

Origin: Founded in October 2000 by Kuldeep Sandhu, former vice president of engineering at Efficient Networks; Santosh Lolayekar, former Cisco engineer; and Harish Nayak, former executive at TCP/IP stack vendor iReady.

Funding: a $25 million second round closed in December 2001, bringing the total to $31 million.

Key investors: Alliance Ventures, Menlo Ventures and Trinity Ventures.

CEO: Kuldeep Sandhu

Product: Unnamed application-aware storage networking platform.

Maranti wants to do for storage networks what application-aware switches do for data networks: prioritize service levels. The San Jose company is building a storage-switching infrastructure that's capable of differentiating between high- and low-priority applications and tailoring service accordingly. For example, an order-management system might get transaction priority over an e-mail application.

Users define storage service policies for multiple applications that access disparate storage resources, including direct- and network-attached storage and storage-area networks. The switch will connect to servers via Gigabit Ethernet and to storage subsystems through Fibre Channel and iSCSI blades. Each port will have its own virtualization engine. Industry observers expect ports to number in the hundreds, but Maranti isn't saying yet.

Customer trials and a formal product launch are planned for this summer, with product availability late in the year. Meanwhile, competition is mounting from storage incumbents Brocade Communications, Inrange Technologies and McData, and from start-ups such as Cisco-backed Andiamo Systems and Sanera Systems.