As the world awaited the congressional vote on the Wall Street bailout bill Wednesday, Hewlett-Packard moved forward with business as usual. The company signed a definitive agreement to acquire LeftHand Networks, a storage virtualization and iSCSI storage area network (SAN) firm.
HP agreed to pay $360 million in cash for LeftHand Networks, which sells solutions to help midsize companies and remote offices of large corporations protect critical business data.
Customers need a faster, less complex, and more economical route to storage networking to protect critical business data, according to Dave Roberson, senior vice president and general manager of HP’s StorageWorks Division.
“The acquisition of LeftHand Networks significantly expands our storage portfolio, enabling HP to deliver customers an expanded suite of storage functionality, scalable capacity, and interconnect options for every budget and performance requirement,” Roberson said. “With our strong channel and leading position in the industry-standard server market, we are ideally positioned to deliver this technology to customers worldwide.”
Bolstering Disaster Recovery
The privately held LeftHand has more than 11,000 installations across 3,000 customers. The company delivers scalable storage software on industry-standard hardware.
HP said the acquisition will help companies move to a SAN for a significantly lower cost, manage data more easily, and scale storage infrastructures incrementally as the businesses grow.
In certain virtualized environments, LeftHand’s intelligent-cloning technology can reduce the amount of disk space required for storage by up to 97 percent, according to the company, and its thin-provisioning features reduce power consumption by minimizing over-provisioning of storage.
LeftHand also features advanced data-replication technology with bandwidth management and failover protection. This makes it ideal for backup and disaster-recovery operations between remote offices and a central location, HP said.
Integration Problems?
With the addition of LeftHand, HP adds midrange offerings to its suite of iSCSI solutions. But therein could lie the challenge, according to Charles King, principal analyst…