Nemertes Impact Analysis

The Impact Analysis is a weekly quick-take on breaking IT news.
Nemertes provides expert insight on how recent IT news affects you.

HP Storage Pitches Southpaw: Buys LeftHand Networks  

HP (NASDAQ:HPQ) made a strategic move to acquire privately held LeftHand
Networks. With LeftHand, HP get's an innovative iSCSI-based storage product
suite, including virtualization, replication, clustering and "intelligent
cloning technology." Management of virtualized data-center storage
infrastructure is a big challenge discussed in the forthcoming Virtualization
benchmark where participants are grappling with exploding SAN requirements and
balancing the complexity and performance of fibre channel against the simplicity
and lower cost of iSCSI.

Impacts:

Enterprises: Scope your virtualization storage requirements early in the
planning process; consider iSCSI as an alternative to fibre channel.

Vendors: This is a competitive move by HP. It adds credence to all storage
providers needing to offer both iSCSI and fibre channel-based storage solutions.

Investors: It's a buyers market: Dell (NASDAQ:DELL) paid $1.4B for EqualLogic
last November; HP will buy LeftHand for $360M. Compellent (NYSE:CML), FalconStor
(NASDAQ:FALC), NexSan (NASDAQ:NXSN) and privately held Celeros, RelData, and
Stonefly are targets.

Ted Ritter, Research Analyst

http://www.nemertes.com/ongoing_research

http://www.hp.com/hpinfo/newsroom/press/2008/081001a.html