HP Acquires LeftHand Networks

      by Wyatt Walter

Hewlett-Packard announced today the purchase of SAN maker LeftHand Networks for $360 million. LeftHand was founded in 1999 and has become a leader in iSCSI SAN solutions. HP plans on adding the LeftHand product into its product line in between the lower-end MSA and the higher-end EVA models. The company boasted 11,000 installations across 3,000 customers worldwide.

LeftHand’s solution is slightly different than HP’s, though will complement HP’s offerings nicely. Their SANs offer themselves up to the network only as iSCSI targets and don’t offer the SAN/NAS compatibility like other competing devices, but they do offer a lower entry point into the SAN arena. Rather than purchasing the head node and adding shelves when additional storage is needed, LeftHand built its SANs upon traditional x86 servers and used filesystem clustering to provide redundancy, performance, and capacity. The benefit to this model is somewhat of a pay-as-you-go model since a company doesn’t have to make a large up-front investment and then smaller investments later. Instead, you can invest less up front and expand the ‘cluster’ as you go.

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Filed under News : Comments (1) : Oct 1st, 2008

One Response to “HP Acquires LeftHand Networks”

  1. Allen Taylor Says:
    October 1st, 2008 at 10:00 pm

    Nice writing. You are on my RSS reader now so I can read more from you down the road.

    Allen Taylor

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