Sun Acquires Nauticus To Improve Network Services Offerings

Nauticus is a privately held Framingham, Mass.-based developer of high-performance Web-based switches that allow enterprises to deliver critical applications with required levels of performance, security and availability, according to Nauticus' Web site. The company said it can improve the delivery of such security and networking services as load balancing and Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) processing.

Nauticus' N2000 series of switches offers up to 24,000 connections per second of SSL and 4 Gbps of cryptographic support, with either four or 12 small form factor Gigabit Ethernet ports.

The N2000V version of the switches adds the capability to create multiple virtual switches, or vSwitches, within the physical switch that are fully partitioned from each other, according to Nauticus. These vSwitches can be dynamically created, removed and configured as needed while the physical switch remains online.

A Sun spokesperson said the company plans to initially make Nauticus' technology part of its Volume Systems Products organization, headed by Neil Knox, executive vice president.

The Nauticus technology, especially the vSwitch capability, may also become part of Sun's N1 strategy for managing entire network computing systems by treating them as a single system through virtualization, the spokesperson said.

Financial details of the acquisition were not disclosed. The deal is expected to close by the end of Sun's current financial quarter, which ends March 28.

Sun has made a number of acquisitions related to its N1 strategy in the past couple of years, including the July 2003 acquisition of application provisioning software vendor CenterRun; the November 2002 acquisition of software deployment automation developer Terraspring; and the September 2002 acquisition of storage virtualization vendor Pirus.