Aarohi Communications was founded in early 2001 to be a provider of enabling technology for intelligent storage networking equipment. In August 2001, Aarohi secured $15 million in Series A financing from Telesoft Partners, Kennet Capital, other VCs and private investors. In December 2002, Aarohi closed $8 million in Series B funding, led by Intel Capital and including previous investors Telesoft, Kennet and private investors.

In August 2003, Aarohi secured $6M in a second close of its Series B round from McDATA, with $6M still to come from new investors. This funding will suffice through early 2005, and Aarohi plans to breakeven by then. Aarohi is headquartered in San Jose, California with a second development center in Bangalore, India. The company has 52 employees.

Intelligent storage networking platforms provide users with network scalability and management advantages by enabling certain storage management applications such as volume management, data migration, replication and backup functions to be redistributed from isolated hosts or storage subsystems into the network infrastructure. End users can realize significant savings in storage management costs by centralizing these applications in the network and deploying them across consolidated storage assets.

However, according to Aarohi, first generation network-based application platforms such as dedicated storage management appliances and proprietary intelligent switches have fallen short of expectations. General-purpose appliances have lacked performance and scalability while custom switch platforms are expensive and difficult to integrate with existing fabrics.

To address this problem, Aarohi has developed FabricStream technology, “the enabling technology for a new generation of intelligent storage networking platforms that will dramatically simplify enterprise storage management and enable heterogeneous storage consolidation.” FabricStream enables high performance, accelerated time-to-market and cost-effective implementation for intelligent storage networking platforms including fabric switches, directors, appliances, servers and storage arrays.

At the heart of the FabricStream architecture is a 20Gbps application processing engine, performance-optimized for offloading and accelerating data-intensive volume and data management applications. FabricStream employs a unique data streaming architecture that delivers sustained wire-speed packet-based processing performance and very low IO latency in comparison to application platforms built with general-purpose CPUs, network processors and/or host bus adapters.

To reduce platform implementation cost, FabricStream products feature an ASIC building block with high functional integration as well as the enabling firmware and software for intelligent processing. Although Aarohi is not releasing product specifics at this time, the company did say that its ASIC building blocks are fabricated by TSMC in 0.13u CMOS.

To speed application development and solution interoperability with FabricStream, Aarohi has launched the FabricStream Alliance Partner Program, which provides partners with priority access to the FabricStream API, SDK, reference platform, integration tools and technical resources. Partner companies that have already endorsed FabricStream include Alacritus Software, FalconStor Software, Incipient, Kashya, and StoreAge Networking Technologies. These partners provide storage management software such as volume management, virtualization, snapshot, migration, replication, backup and recovery.

Target customers include storage networking system vendors who build switches, directors, gateways, storage management appliances and array controllers. The storage networking systems market is projected to grow to over $5 billion in the next 3-4 years. By 2006, a large percentage of the storage networking fabric ports will require additional intelligence for processing existing and new storage applications, translating between multiple protocols and handling a 10Gbps infrastructure. This increased complexity driven by the higher performance needs of storage networking equipment is driving a multi-$100 million opportunity for Aarohi FabricStream technology, according to the company.

FabricStream has received validation from platform providers and storage application partners. McDATA plans to incorporate FabricStream in its intelligent switch platforms.

According to Aarohi, most other storage chip companies focus on specific tasks such as HBA, RAID or TCP/iSCSI offload. Aarohi’s primary competition comes from general-purpose CPUs (Intel, PPC) or network processors. Aarohi’s purpose-built processing engine has an optimized data path for storage-centric applications, built in storage-specific interfaces, and a storage-specific software stack to the FabricStream API, which interfaces directly to storage applications.

Ameesh Divatia, CEO (Previously Chief Product Strategist for the Optical Transport Business Unit at Cisco. He came to Cisco through the acquisition of PipeLinks, where he was the founder and CTO.)

Tony Gaddis, VP of Engineering (previously GM for HP-UX server development)

Steve VonderHaar, VP of Sales & Business Development (previously VP of Business Development at LuxN, an optical networking start-up)

Joel Warford, Senior Director of Marketing & Strategic Alliances (previously Senior Director of Product Marketing at Rhapsody Networks and Gadzoox Networks)