Troika Networks

Troika Networks, founded in 1998 by Kevin Cox and Bill Terrell, was a provider of network storage platforms and a pioneer in intelligent storage networks. The company was based in Westlake Village, California.

Troika's flagship product was the Accelera Network Storage Services (NSS) appliance, a hardware and software solution designed to optimize storage applications for enterprises. The Accelera platform provided hardware acceleration for Fibre Channel (FC) and I/O traffic, and it was engineered to integrate with a variety of third-party applications for services like backup, mirroring, and snapshots. This design aimed to offer businesses greater flexibility in data management and protection, allowing them to add capabilities to their Storage Area Network (SAN) through a policy-based approach. A key feature was its ability to work with FC switches and storage arrays from multiple vendors, giving customers more choice in their infrastructure.

The company raised a total of $81.4 million over three funding rounds, with investors including New Enterprise Associates, DFJ, Intel Capital, and Anthem Venture Partners. In 2005, Troika bundled its Accelera appliance with StoreAge's Storage Virtualization Manager (SVM) suite to create the SAN Volume Suite (SVS). This bundled offering provided tools for storage virtualization tasks such as creating and expanding volumes, creating snapshots, and mirroring critical data. The company was eventually acquired, continuing its legacy as part of a larger entity.

Keywords: network storage, storage virtualization, data management, Fibre Channel, storage area network, SAN, Accelera, data protection, I/O acceleration, storage hardware, enterprise storage, Bill Terrell, Kevin Cox, intelligent storage networks, SAN Volume Suite, storage optimization