Company positions new device as challenger to Cisco, Brocade Sandial Systems emerged from stealth mode today with something many others in its market don’t have: a customer.The Portsmouth, N.H.-based startup is at work on a storage switch that the company claims is being used by shoe manufacturer New Balance. The new switch, which will come out later this year, is being positioned against forthcoming so-called “intelligent” storage switches from Cisco Systems, Brocade Communications Systems, Maranti Networks, and Sanera Systems. These switches are very dense in terms of ports and have been created to run software that today resides on hosts or in the array. By moving the software into the network and onto the individual ports of the switch, many in this nascent market believe they’ll be able to improve application performance.Sandial is mum on the specifics of its switch, yet announced New Balance was testing the product. According to Eric Blonda, product marketing manager at Sandial, contends traditional Fibre Channel vendors have done well until recent years and that now customers are demanding choices. In other words, they don’t want to buy their switch with an array, but separately. “We want to be the datacenter plumbing company and layer in services as market is ready,” Blonda said. “We’re focusing on plumbing — management and connectivity.”He says the switch is a “storage backbone switch” and its intelligence is that much greater than what is perceived as next-generation director-class switches being talked about today by competitors.Welts hints the switch will not have a shared memory and will be able to differentiate traffic by port and then prioritize it in real time. Sandial officials say New Balance is using the switch to provision bandwidth specifically for back-ups. Technology Industry