SAN Vendor Gadzoox Buys SmartSAN Systems

Fibre Channel network equipment vendor Gadzoox Networks (San Jose, CA) has collected the components needed to build wide-area storage area networks (SANs) by acquiring SmartSAN Systems (Santa Clara, CA). Gadzoox will trade 360,000 shares of stock, worth approximately $23.5 million for the privately held company.

As enterprise SAN deployments increase and as new SAN opportunities emerge in the Internet service provider, application service provider, co-location and telecom markets, Gadzoox believes the ability to integrate SANs with the, LAN, optical area network, SCSI, and WAN infrastructure will become increasingly important for its growth. Unlike localized groups of SAN islands that can connect to nearby backbone switches, distributed SANs in large enterprise and service provider environments will need to connect to one another over much longer distances.

Gadzoox produces switches and hubs for SANs, while SmartSAN produces routers and management products. Where Fibre Channel today is limited to about six miles, the SmartSAN technology translates Fibre Channel traffic into asynchronous transfer mode (ATM), Gigabit Ethernet, or another wide-area networking technology and back again allowing SANs to share data across greater distances. SmartSAN has 15 people, primarily involved in R&D, making the acquisition primarily a technology buy. The deal is expected to close in about four weeks.

Edited by John Spofford