HP's Midmarket Move: Buying LeftHand
The deal will enable HP to wrap LeftHand's midsize, remote and branch office storage virtualization and iSCSI SAN into its already growing arsenal of storage and virtualization offerings.
"Joining with HP is a natural fit for our customers and channel partners, giving them an expanded portfolio of server, storage and networking products and services that are already supported by LeftHand Networks' solutions," said Bill Chambers, LeftHand's CEO, in a statement. "The combination of LeftHand Networks' virtualization technologies with HP's has the power to significantly accelerate server consolidation projects by making the deployment of shared storage much easier and more cost-effective."
HP is looking to LeftHand, Boulder, Colo., to broaden its virtualization solutions in the midmarket with software that can run on both existing storage and industry-standard server hardware. The goal is to reduce training time and overall complexity by supporting existing environments. According to Palo Alto, Calif.-based HP, LeftHand software and hardware offerings let companies move to a SAN for significantly lower cost, manage their data more easily and scale their storage infrastructures incrementally as their businesses grow.
HP said in a statement that the acquisition will enable it to add midrange offerings to its existing suite of iSCSI solutions to target customers at the low end of the market. Solutions will include the HP StorageWorks All-in-One Storage System and HP StorageWorks Modular Smart Array. On the high end, HP will offer the HP StorageWorks Enterprise Virtual Array line.