CIENA agreed to acquire Akara Corporation, a start-up developing SAN over SONET/SDH solutions, for an aggregate consideration of $45 million consisting of $31 million in cash and $14 million in shares of CIENA common stock. Akara’s OUSP 2000 product family multiplexes data center protocols such as Fibre Channel, FICON, ESCON and Gigabit Ethernet in their native formats onto any SONET/SDH (DS3, OC-3/12/48, STM-1/4/16), DWDM or dark fiber network. Akara is based in Ottawa, Canada.
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http://www.akara.com
- In June 2003, Akara introduced a FICON over SONET solution for IBM customers extending XRC over distances beyond 1000 km. The solution combines Akara’s OUSP 2000 platform and IBM’s TotalStorage Enterprise Storage Server (codename Shark) eXtended Remote Copy (XRC) implementation.
- Akara was co-founded by Solomon Wong, who formerly served with Cambrian Systems (acquired by Nortel Networks); and Stephen Adolph, who previously worked for Nortel Networks. The company is led by Edward Ogonek, who most recently served as executive vice president and general manager at Alcatel Telecom. Prior to Alcatel, Ogonek was EVP of Newbridge’s switching and routing group.
- Investors in Akara included Corning Innovation Ventures, Dain Rauscher Wessels Morgan Keegan, Presidio Venture Partners, Sumitomo Corporation, Battery Ventures and Greylock Partners.