Sun Adds Pirus Networks to Storage Stable

The Santa Clara, Calif.-based company announced Thursday it has purchased the privately held Pirus Networks, based in Acton, Mass., for an undisclosed stock-for-stock transaction. The acquisition is expected to be completed by Dec. 29 this year.

Pirus Networks is a relatively new startup involved the trend of developing intelligent storage switches to manage data by converging multiple storage devices, services, protocols and networks into a single platform. Now, the company will become part of Sun's network storage organization, which reports to Mark Canepa, executive vice president of storage.

Sun executives said this merger is tied to Sun's N1 architecture strategy. Pirus' technology will give Sun virtualization capabilities. The startup already had some products on the market, namely the Pirus PSX 1000 platform, the Servflex File Services, theStorFlex Box Services, the PirusView and Secure Virtual Storage Domains. These products help IT managers centralize capacity, provision on demand and boost asset use.

Last year, Sun purchased HighGround Systems to acquire its Storage Resource Manager technology, which enabled IT administrators to monitor storage and generate reports to better track storage capacity and its use.

This past August, IBM Tivoli software purchased Glen Ellyn, Ill.-based TrellisSoft. This startup gave IBM SRM technology. Tivoli executives said they made this purchase because the SRM space has been identified as the fastest-growing subsection of storage. For instance, the Hurwitz Group anticipates this space to experience a 30 percent compound growth rate through 2005. And Giga Research said SRM will go from a $1 billion market in 2000 to a $5 billion market in 2005.

SRM and virtualization have been identified as two necessary components in developing a broad-based storage management software platform.