Sanera Nets $35 Million

Sanera Systems, which made a splash recently with its 256-port FC switch, has received $35 million in third-round financing.

The money will be used to fund customer and channel development for the Sanera DS10000, a product the company claims is “the industry’s first data center-class director.”

The round was led by Sanera’s current investors, including ArrowPath, CMEA Ventures, Enterprise Partners Venture Capital, Goldman Sachs, Greylock, and
Storm Ventures. To date, Sanera has raised a total of $101 million in financing. The funding comes after an effort by McDATA to acquire Sanera apparently fell through.

“This investment is further validation of Sanera’s strong product offering, market potential, and strategic value within a rapidly changing storage networking market,” states Sanera Chairman Alex Mendez. “The DS10000’s secure dynamic partitioning capability, market leading scalability, and open storage services platform has created significant interest with beta customers and current industry leaders. With this additional investment, Sanera is poised to deliver its DS10000 data center-class director product to market, expand its customer and channel relationships, and capitalize on the
exponential growth of datacenter storage networks.”

According to IDC, the director chassis market is the fastest growing switch segment, with expected growth from $375 million in 2002 to $1.27 billion in 2007, a CAGR (compound annual growth rate) of 23%. The market growth is fueled by the consolidation of storage and server resources and the emerging need for intelligent, highly scalable data center-class switches.

The DS10000 recently set a new industry benchmark in independent testing with Miercom, recording the highest performance and lowest latency of any Fibre
Channel director in the market, according to Sanera.

The Sanera DS10000 data center-class director, introduced in April, is “the only product that enables enterprises to securely consolidate SAN islands and integrate intelligent storage utility services on one platform, significantly lowering cost and simplifying SAN management,” the company says.

With up to 256 non-blocking 2Gbps ports or up to 64 10Gbps ports per chassis, the DS10000 is made for SAN consolidation, large fabric deployment, and in-network storage services integration. Its dynamic partitioning feature allows enterprises to consolidate SANs into a single system while maintaining the administrative autonomy and security of independent SAN islands. According to Sanera, the product provides “five-nines” (99.999%) availability with full hardware redundancy and non-disruptive code load and activation, and includes native multi-protocol support for Fibre Channel, Ethernet/iSCSI, and FICON.

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