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Storage analyst Deni Connor focuses on storage, application and infrastructure management in this twice-weekly newsletter.
HP acquired one of the last independent iSCSI storage vendors last week in a $360 million all-cash deal. The company snapped up LeftHand Networks to bolster its small and mid-range storage offerings and be able to give its customers a broad storage offering. HP will be able to leverage LeftHand’s iSCSI expertise in its up-to-now paltry iSCSI hardware.
The deal follows another iSCSI deal this year – that of Dell’s acquisition of EqualLogic in January 2008. HP's buy will position the vendor to attack the growing iSCSI market. LeftHand has a lot of those customers – it claims as many as 11,000 implementations in 3,000 customers.
HP will add LeftHand’s SAN software and its Network Storage Modules to its StorageWorks line along with its All-in-One, Enterprise Virtual Arrays and Modular Smart Arrays. LeftHand’s SAN/iQ software runs on commodity x86 servers and has been bundled by resellers with HP ProLiant servers for over two years now. In contrast, EqualLogic products use their own proprietary storage arrays. LeftHand also introduced a Virtual SAN Appliance that lets an iSCSI SAN run on a virtual machine just as it would do on physical servers.
According to IDC, the iSCSI / IP SAN market is expected to grow to $4.4 billion by 2012.
The acquisition is HP’s second storage acquisition of the year. In March, HP acquired Tower Software, a document and records management software company.
LeftHand was founded in 1999 as a vendor of iSCSI SANs – at the time, iSCSI was a pioneering technology. The company is based in Boulder, Colo., and has 215 employees.
Deni Connor is principal analyst for Storage Strategies NOW and host of both the Masters of Storage and Masters of Servers Solution Centers.
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Gartner 2009 Magic Quadrant for Job Scheduling
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Comments (4)
HP removes VAR differentiation advantageBy Jon Steele on October 7, 2008, 11:38 pmSelling LeftHand was hard enough, now every HP VAR will be able to sell LeftHand so once again the margins drop. Time to recheck out the independents like Falconstor...
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DataCore has announced a program to lure LeftHand resellersBy Jon Steele on October 8, 2008, 12:38 amAlready happened - DataCore has already announced a program and others will likely do so to quickly target the LeftHand resellers.
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LeftHand HardwareBy Joel Snyder on October 10, 2008, 12:43 amWhen we tested iSCSI arrays a few months ago, LeftHand shipped us for testing their software loaded on HP storage arrays; they reformatted the arrays (which normally...
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What about those customers with Dell and IBM platforms?By Anonymous on October 11, 2008, 12:15 pmFirst question, if it is just a HP server and disks why pay such a premium for LeftHand. What happens to Dell, IBM, and non HP platform owners.
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