Maranti Opens to Rave Reviews

Maranti Networks has unveiled an intelligent network storage services controller that one analyst claims puts the start-up at the front of the pack.

“I am very big on Maranti,” says Nancy Marrone-Hurley, senior analyst at Enterprise Storage Group. “I really believe this is the most intelligent platform on the market today for a number of reasons, and although other vendors offer some of the features that Maranti’s solution brings, none offer a fully-integrated switching platform with as many features as the CoreSTOR system.”

Maranti’s CoreSTOR product line, more than three years in development, consists of the Maranti CoreSTOR 2000 (16 port) and CoreSTOR 3000 (128 Port) Adaptive Storage Services Platforms, the CoreSTOR Storage Services suite, and Maranti STORIAN Manager.

Surprisingly, the company’s three co-founders have backgrounds that reflect networking and semiconductor influences more than storage. Co-founder and marketing VP Harish Nayak told Enterprise Storage Forum that the co-founders started work on Maranti in March 2000 by studying how data networking and routing technologies evolved, hoping to do for storage networking what Cisco and Juniper did for routers.

The result is a platform that eliminates storage bottlenecks through distributed per-port processing, pools storage across platforms, offers Quality of Service (QoS) on an application-by-application basis, and makes it all seem easy with single-step storage provisioning. As if that weren’t enough, Maranti also delivers blistering performance — 800,000 IOPS (Input/Output operations per second) for the CoreSTOR 2000 and 6 million virtualized IOPS (VIOPS) for the CoreSTOR 3000.

“With processors at every port, the Maranti solution can evaluate a packet as it arrives and automatically apply storage services on a packet-by-packet basis,” says Marrone-Hurley. “Maranti’s CoreSTOR architecture also provides a level of performance that will be difficult for vendors with blade-based technologies to compete with.”

Entry-level prices are about $35,000 for the CoreSTOR 2000 and $80,000 for the CoreSTOR 3000 — pricing that’s “extremely competitive with products that don’t even offer the same performance,” says Rick Walsworth, Maranti’s director of product management.

Based on a fully distributed in-line, cut-through processing architecture, Maranti’s platforms deliver low-latency, high-speed I/O performance through
each of the port-based storage processing engines, providing centrally managed, high-performance storage services from any storage device to any server in the network. The CoreSTOR system manages service levels based on the business value of the data, increasing application availability and allowing mirroring and replication across heterogeneous arrays.

The platforms are built on a fault-tolerant architecture with internal redundancy and no single point of failure. They support both Fibre Channel and iSCSI connectivity.

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