Pirus Is Switching On Convergence.

Startup company Pirus Networks burst through the corporate eggshell with the introduction of the Pirus Storage Utility Switch, an intelligent storage networking infrastructure designed to leverage Fibre Channel and IP/Ethernet protocols, provide storage subsystem and location independence, and consolidate existing installed equipment.

Equally noteworthy is Pirus' stealth growth pattern. Within a year Pirus has seen its staff swell from 12 to 120, and has secured more than $45 million in funding. They've also acquired Blue Spruce and doubled the size of the company's headquarters in Massachussetts. CTR spoke with Pirus CEO Richard Napolitano to gain insight on the secret behind their success. Napolitano has a strong background in operating systems and storage software, and is a veteran of the startup realm.

CTR: Tell our readers about the technology of the switch.

RN: There are many ways to look at this product. I give Richard Corly, Pirus' founder, a lot of credit for his basic hardware architecture of the product. From a storage perspective it's novel, and from a networking perspective it's more traditional in some ways. But a storage person looking at this architecture can see interesting and new ways of doing things. The whole notion of having a lot of ports coming into the box, behind those ports a large amount of computation, behind those computational elements a cross bar switch, and behind that another set of computational elements, and then to be connected to ports is a very interesting architecture fundamentally.

And when you take that platform and apply sophisticated TCP processing, FC processing, block virtualization, file system technology, and the ability to translate FC to iSCSI or iSCSI to FC, you have a next generation platform that is fundamentally a multi-protocol storage switch. To the end user it looks like a platform that allows the user to access storage, whether on Gigabit Ethernet or Fibre Channel, whether they want to access storage using block semantics or file system semantics. It doesn't require the user to buy the storage elements from us. We are fundamentally agnostic to the wire, to the protocol, and to the subsystem behind it. We allow you to collapse the block and file infrastructure behind one large storage subsystem.

CTR: How will it impact storage networking?

RN: I think of the storage utility switch product as a next generation storage platform that enables users to provide both block and file independent of the media, and not only local access but remote access as well. You can think about the propositions as being local access agnostic to protocol, wide area access agnostic to protocol and independence from the type of storage subsystem. (The switch allows you to) choose any method, media or equipment, which means you are not locked into a single vendor. The proposition it offers to the marketplace is that you can scale your front-end servers independent of the vendor, architecture, or operating system, and you can also scale your back-end storage to individual vendors. Other companies in this field are offering products that are point solutions.

Today you can buy an appliance to do NAS, virtualization, or extend the reach of local FC to a MAN. But do you really want to? Do you want to build an infrastructure with a variety of appliances or do you want to integrate those appliances into one unified platform managed one way, converging two disparate universes for storage, converging the infrastructures for block and file, and converging the infrastructure for Fibre Channel and Gigabit Ethernet. One network, one solution.

CTR: In a year that is considerably challenging for the marketplace, how were you able to secure so much funding?

RN: We are living in a world in which networking and storage are converging, a great space in terms of technological innovation. The solution we are working on is intriguing to engineers because it truly is a convergence product. At Pirus, if you ask a storage engineer if they would like to work on a next generation storage platform, they ask if they can also work on networking stuff. And you say, "of course." And the networking guys want to work on storage stuff. And you say "of course." In the end, everybody is learning new things and a huge amount of invention is happening. We really are living on the cusp of this convergence.

The overall economics of our expansion was clear from the beginning. Richard Corly, the founder of Pirus, is a great guy and a fabulous architect. He did a wonderful job of building the initial team. If you cut the team down the middle, you would find a large contingent of network savvy people.

You put very strong macroeconomic effect in terms of convergence of these technologies, you've taken a team that that has a proven track record of delivering extremely far ahead of other companies in this space and a product in beta, and you can see why we are so successful. We're already working on second generation product when other people are just beginning on their first.

CTR: How have you grown from 12 employees to more than 120 in just a year?

RN: Being part of a team that looks like it's going to win attracts other winning players. My experience with hiring a great engineering team is that an initial core of 30 or 40 people with truly exceptional engineering talent attracts more and more people.

In addition, the downturn has helped us to some degree. We can continue to maintain very high hiring standards while other startups are lowering their standards. Frankly our personal networks are very strong, having been through a number of startups and being in this area for 20 years or more.

CTR: Can you tell us about any possible OEM contracts?

RN: I can't really disclose the terms of any of those. I can tell you that the overall strategy is something we are working diligently on. We look at the OEM business as three buckets: Storage OEMs like Hitachi, EMC, MTI, and Brocade, server OEMs like Sun, HP, IBM, Compaq, and others, and telecommunication companies like Cisco, Nortel, and Lucent.

We are very focused on companies in each of those segments, though not all of those companies are in parallel, since that would overwhelm our companies' abilities to meet our commitments.

CTR: How do you address the channel?

RN: One of things I've learned about going overseas, where there is a lot of revenue opportunity, is that you need the product to be bulletproof. Otherwise it doesn't make sense from a quality perspective. So we are very focused on our direct touch customers right now and our OEMs. In addition to that we are in the early stages of conversation with high value add VARs out there that can deliver complete enterprise solutions to the marketplace. But that is a lower priority than the first two.

CTR: What is Pirus' philosophy for running smoothly?

RN: There are three main principles. The first two are that you stay alive and raise capital. The third is that you have to really listen to the customer. Left to our own devices, we engineers will just build a thousand story building, even though they only want 10 stories. This is why storage networks are so important to us as a startup. Getting that first customer grounds you in reality. And the last principle is that you deliver on your commitments.