LeftHand Gets $20M In Funding, Aims For 100% Channel Play
That brings total funding for the company to about $39 million, said David Bangs, vice president of sales and marketing. LeftHand Networks offers products to build scalable, fault-tolerant storage pools that can be shared over an Ethernet network.
LeftHand Networks focuses on midsize businesses that have between 250 and 5,000 employees and growing database needs, and that are looking to migrate from tape-based backups to disk-based backups, said Bangs. "Such customers may have looked at Fibre Channel SANs," he said. "But Fibre Channel cost and complexity inhibited them from growing their SANs. We give them an easy-to-scale, low-cost disaster-recovery capability with data replication."
The company's hardware offering is the Network Storage Module, a 1U, rack-mount device with up to a half-Tbyte of capacity on four hot-swappable hard drives. It has a Gbit Ethernet connector for connecting to IP networks as would a NAS appliance, but transfers data in block fashion much like a SAN array, Bangs said.
Last year, the company introduced its Distributed Storage Matrix software application. Using the software, multiple NSM devices connected to a LAN or WAN with their own unique IP addresses can be connected as a virtual storage pool, with on-the-fly expansion of both capacity and bandwidth as needed. As such, it allows one-way to three-way data replication and the capability to do snap copies of data.
Over 50 percent of U.S. revenue currently come from indirect sales channels, including direct to solution providers and via one distributor, the Comstor division of Westcon. The company does not have any OEM engagements, said Bangs.
"We offer great margins and a rock-solid registration program," Bangs said. "We want to build our channel side so that eventually 100 percent of our sales are indirect."