Max-T Pursues BlueArc

Like its namesake Mister T, Max-T (Maximum Throughput) apparently likes to make a big entrance. It smashed its way out of stealth mode today with some bold words about BlueArc Corp.

"We're going to take Enrico [Pesatori, CEO of BlueArc] and his boys out of the water," says Gautham Sastri, CEO and founder of Max-T. [ed.note: and then what...dry them with a towel?]

Fighting talk -- especially for a small, unknown company with a name like a cosmetics line. But Max-T says it has the test results to back up its claims.

Both companies offer network-attached storage (NAS) devices that reportedly hit throughput speeds of around 2 Gbit/s about ten times faster than off-the-shelf servers equipped with network interface cards. In other words, these new boxes are supposed to keep up with the speed of the network, rather than becoming a bottleneck on it.

Max-T and BlueArc each touts its method as the fastest on the planet -- bar none.BlueArc released benchmark results, performed by eTestingLabs earlier this month, which demonstrate 1,780-Mbit/s throughput (see BlueArc Touts NAS Test).

Max-T has leaked Byte and Switch its own numbers, performed by the same benchmarking company, which narrowly beat BlueArc’s results at 1,800 Mbit/s. The initial results of the test can be viewed at Max-T.

Keep in mind, these numbers are unofficial; they have not yet been corroborated by eTestingLabs, and won't be for another two weeks. Until the numbers are official, BlueArc is still the winner.

”Their claims seem great, almost too good to be believed,” says Geoff Barrall, CTO and founder of BlueArc. “We have seen new technology coming from many other serious NAS vendors using very similar hardware and none of them even come close to what Max-T claims. Until Max-T’s results are published in full they haven’t proven anything."

In case you were wondering, there is a point to these macho micturition matches. The faster the throughput performance, the quicker data can be moved around to more end users. For example, for financial institutions whose livings depend on fast data crunching, throughput speeds are essential.The difference between Max-T and BlueArc is in how they’ve chosen to tackle the problem. Max-T’s product, codenamed Sledgehammer, is a piece of “smart” software [ed.note: sounds smart!] that resides on a bog-standard Intel server. The beta ships to customers this week.

BlueArc’s Si7500 SiliconServer, on the other hand, is all hardware. Reprogrammable chips run TCP/IP and NFS in hardware, because only in hardware can you get “orders-of-magnitude-faster” response times, according to BlueArc.

”Nonsense,” says Sastri. “What you need is lots of clever software programmers.” [I pity the fool...]

Max-T's team looks strong. Sastri built supercomputers at NEC Corp. (Nasdaq: NIPNY) for about 10 years. Michael Huges, VP of research and development, ran product development at Discreet Logic, bought by AutoDesk for $440 million. Giovanni Tagliamonti, VP of finance, hails from Andersen Consulting; and Bill Meder, (aka Bill Meter because he’s so expensive, apparently) was previously a senior exec at IBM Corp. (NYSE: IBM) and is currently onboard to help the company raise money.

On that note, the company looks like it is close to running on empty. Max-T won a seed round of $2.5 million in February from TeleSystem Ltd., which is expected to last it through to the end of the year.— Jo Maitland, Senior Editor, Byte and Switch http://www.byteandswitch.com