Intransa Quiet on Plansa

Intransa Inc., looking to launch its iSCSI-based storage system sometime this year, has raised an additional $6 million in funding, bringing its total funding to date to $33 million (see Intransa Pulls Down $6M Round).

Investors in the latest round include its previous investors -- 3Com Corp. (Nasdaq: COMS), Advanced Technology Ventures (ATV), Sofinnova Ventures Inc., and U.S. Venture Partners -- as well as another "strategic investor" that Intransa says wants to remain anonymous for now.

Alan Kessler, Intransa's president and CEO, says the funding will be used to build a "very small, focused sales team," as well as a service infrastructure, as the company gears up to launch later in 2003.

The company, founded in September 2000, evidently is also still hiring on the engineering side. Its site advertises job openings for quality-assurance engineers, a security architect, and -- can this be right? -- a "director of architecture," who's supposed to "define, establish, document, and articulate the architectural direction and product portfolio for Intransas storage networking technology." WHOA! Wait right there, cowpoke. Shouldn't y'all have crossed that bridge already?

Maybe this explains why its product, which Intransa originally expected to deliver by the end of 2002, is a no-show. It probably also doesn't help that the iSCSI protocol, which sends SCSI commands over IP networks, took about six months longer than the industry expected to make it through the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF)'s IP storage technical working group (see iSCSI Spec Set and Microsoft Won't Ship iSCSI in .NET).Kessler tells us it's still too soon to divulge any details about the nuts and bolts of Intransa's IP storage array. He says the company is starting to install the product in a few customer sites, but it won't technically be entering beta "for a while."

Well, at least we know what enclosure it's going to sit inside. In November 2002, to show the world it was still alive and kicking, Intransa announced a deal with Xyratex, a U.K. storage networking equipment supplier, under which Intransa will use Xyratex's 3U-high, 16-bay disk-array enclosure (see Intransa Peeks Out).

Kessler is more comfortable discussing Intransa's market positioning. He says the system is being designed for enterprises and educational institutions that either want to protect their current investment in SANs or haven't been able to afford them, based on the technologies today.

To drive this home, Kessler points to Intransa's slogan: "Simply Smarter." "That's what we're about," he says. "We're based on standards, based on things like Ethernet and IP."

This sounds suspiciously like a recent slogan of 3Com ("Simply Connect"), not to mention the marketing creed of Palm Inc. (Nasdaq: PALM) -- the two companies where Kessler previously served in executive roles. He served as president of Palm, when it was still a 3Com subsidiary; prior to that he was senior VP of 3Com's global customer service organization.Is Kessler trying to bring a Palm-like marketing approach to SANs? Not really, he says. (He didn't seem at all amused when we suggested this.)

"I don't know I would say this is 'the Palm of storage,' " he says. "The customers we're targeting have higher-end enterprise needs."

Intransa, he says, is not trying to compete at "the pinnacle" of the market against the likes of EMC Corp. (NYSE: EMC). Rather, it sees a huge market for midrange storage that runs Microsoft Corp. (Nasdaq: MSFT) Exchange Server and SQL Server.

The target customers for Intransa "don't want to pay for the five 9s" -- that's 99.999 percent uptime -- "for huge utility storage systems," Kessler says. "They don't want to have to hire and train Fibre Channel experts."

Sounds great. But we should point out that by the time Intransa gets its product out the door, it will probably be facing a phalanx of serious competitors -- including Dell Computer Corp. (Nasdaq: DELL) and Network Appliance Inc. (Nasdaq: NTAP), which are both at work on iSCSI-based systems (see our interview with Rhonda Gass, VP of Storage Systems Development, Dell).Other competitors include LeftHand Networks -- which will have at least a two-year lead in the market on Intransa -- and other startups, including EqualLogic Inc. and Pillar Data Systems.

— Todd Spangler, US Editor, Byte and Switch