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HP acquires LeftHand networks for $360 million

October 5th, 2008 • Related • Filed Under

HP has acquired LeftHand Networks Inc., a storage virtualization and iSCSI storage area network (SAN) solutions company for $360 million in cash. LeftHand Networks’ solutions enable midsize companies and remote offices or branches of large corporations to easily and cost-effectively protect critical business data

Founded in 1999, LeftHand Networks is privately held and headquartered in Boulder, Colo. It has 215 employees and more than 500 resellers and distributors worldwide. The company has more than 11,000 installations across 3,000 different customers.

Since raising its first round in March 2001, LeftHand has brought in $86 million in venture capital. Its largest investor was Sprout Group, the inactive venture capital arm of Credit Suisse that led the company’s Series B round. Other investors include Boulder Ventures, Epic Ventures, Garage Technology Ventures, Ironside Venture Partners, New World Ventures, Portage Venture Partners, Sequel Venture Partners, Vista Ventures and William Blair Capital Partners.

The company is a iSCSI SAN technology provider and provides storage software on industry-standard hardware. LeftHand SANs provide:

High Availability - Built-in Network RAID and synchronous replication, providing more protection than typical hardware RAID, which only protects against disk failures.
Scalable Performance from entry-level 6 TB SATA SANs to enterprise-class 100+ TB SAS SANs. Performance increases each time capacity is added and customers can avoid controller upgrades.
Simple Management through an enterprise storage management which includes the 5 key features: Storage Clustering, Network RAID, Thin Provisioning, Snapshots, and Remote Copy.

Data centers equipped with VMware ESX servers can install LeftHand Networks’ Virtual SAN Appliance (VSA™) software, which creates a virtual storage node using resources that already exist inside the servers. These nodes can be clustered together to transform existing server storage capacity into a virtual storage system, which can be managed as a single iSCSI SAN.