Is Trebia Up for Sale?

Storage networking chip startup Trebia Networks Inc. claims it has proved its SAN silicon is the fastest on the planet -- topping 300,000 I/O operations per second on a Fibre Channel over IP (FCIP) test -- even as sources tell Byte and Switch its investors are looking to sell the company (see Trebia Claims to Hit 309K IOPS).

Virtually the entire original management team of Trebia has departed, including president and CEO Bob Conrad, VP of engineering Willie Anderson, VP of marketing Brendon Howe, and VP of sales Alan Litchfield (see Trebia Ousts CEO).

Now, say several sources familiar with the startup, the VCs are looking to sell the company. The sources did not provide any hint about who might be interested in buying Trebia.

Trebia officials did not respond to requests for comment, nor did representatives from three of its largest investors: Atlas Venture, Kodiak Venture Partners, and Raza Foundries.

Last week, Atiq Raza, CEO of Raza Foundries, told Byte and Switch that Ruediger "Rudi" Stroh, former CEO of wireless chip startup Systemonic (since bought by Philips Semiconductor) was "on board" as CEO. However, neither Stroh nor Trebia has officially confirmed this. Trebia executives say only that Stroh is a member of the startup's board of directors (see Trebia Taps Stroh as CEO).Meanwhile, Trebia is touting in-house performance testing of its SNP-1000 using the FCIP protocol, which it says blows away everything else on the market. The startup says one of its SNP-1000 chips can sustain 309,000 IOPS and up to 450 Mbyte/s of throughput across two Gigabit Ethernet ports -- all while consuming less than 1 percent of the host system's CPU cycles.

"We ran the same traffic profiles on native Fibre Channel and then introduced our chip to run those protocols, and we had a 99.5 percent performance preservation," says George Harper, director of product marketing. "We believe IP storage is now viable for SANs."

However, Trebia hasn't yet released performance numbers for its iSCSI-only chip, the SNP-500, which is designed for endpoint devices with PCI-X bus interfaces. Harper says "the numbers for iSCSI are looking good but we haven't completed that testing." He adds that the SNP-500 uses the same TCP offload engine (TOE) that's used in the SNP-1000 (see Vendors Chip Into IP Storage and Trebia Ships Storage Chips).

Another startup, Silverback Systems Inc., recently claimed its storage processor, tested using simulated iSCSI traffic, delivered 92,000 IOPS (see Silverback Makes iSCSI Howl).

Trebia says it has landed two OEMs for its FCIP-based chip: LSI Logic Corp. (NYSE: LSI) and McData Corp. (Nasdaq: MCDTA). Those companies, however, aren't ready to discuss how they plan to use Trebia's chips in their products.To test the SNP-1000, Trebia set up two Fibre Channel SAN fabrics running Brocade Communications Systems Inc. (Nasdaq: BRCD) and McData switches. It then connected them using a pair of Linux servers, running 1GHz Intel Corp. (Nasdaq: INTC) processors, which were configured with its chips running on 32-bit 33MHz PCI cards. Those Linux boxes were connected to each other over Gigabit Ethernet and to the SANs via Fibre Channel. Trebia used I-Tech Corp.'s Satellite-8MP analyzer to measure I/O.

Figure 1:

One of the key metrics from the test, according to Trebia, was the very low CPU utilization the SNP-1000 delivered. "We seriously could have run this with a Palm," says Harper. "We used the cheapest host we could find."

The chip works with Red Hat Inc. (Nasdaq: RHAT) Linux 8; and Trebia has also ported its software to run on Solaris, Windows NT, and VxWorks. It sees two primary applications for the SNP-1000: for switches, to connect IP storage networks to Fibre Channel networks; and as a "bolt-on approach" for vendors that want to IP-enable their existing Fibre Channel initiators and targets. "It's a really fast time-to-market play for delivering IP storage," says Harper.

Trebia expects the shipping version of the SNP-1000 to be released end of the second quarter, priced at $335 each in volume in the switch incarnation. Assuming, that is, that the company is still around at that point.Todd Spangler, US Editor, Byte and Switch