Fibre Channel test and measurement vendor Finisar last week spun out a portion of its business that is used for monitoring and analysis of storage-area networking environments (Compare Storage products).

The company let loose its NetWisdom business. NetWisdom consist of three products: NetWisdom Express, NetWisdom Enterprise and NetWisdom Enterprise Expert. Each is designed to provide a new level of diagnosis and prevention of complex, heterogeneous, Fibre Channel SANs.

NetWisdom Express uses a software agent called ProbeV to collect statistics from Fabric switches. NetWisdom Enterprise uses ProbeFCX probes to view every packet on the SAN in real-time and collect protocol level metrics and faults. NetWisdom Enterprise Expert adds the Xgig Protocol Analyzer to perform detailed offline analysis of problematic storage traffic.

The company sold the NetWisdom business to an investment group comprised of Mark Urdahl, formerly of IBM, Jim Davidson for Silver Lake Partners and Steve Mankoff, formerly of Siebel Systems. Urdahl was co-founder of the Fibre Channel Systems Initiative and president and CEO of startup StorScape, which was consumed by Hermes SoftLab in 2003. Finisar will maintain a minority stake in the company.

No one knows the name of the new company, other than it will be based in Scotts Valley, Calif., and have about 20 employees.

Deni Connor is principal analyst for Storage Strategies NOW.