HP to buy LeftHand Networks

Hewlett-Packard announced on Wednesday that it intends to buy storage specialist LeftHand Networks for $360 million.

Privately held LeftHand will fill out HP's virtualization offerings as the tech giant targets midsize companies and corporate branch offices trying to keep costs under control as their data storage needs expand.

Founded in 1999, Boulder, Colo.-based LeftHand has had a particular focus on iSCSI storage area network (SAN) technology. It has 215 employees.

The all-cash deal is expected to close in the first quarter of HP's fiscal year 2009. LeftHand will be integrated into the StorageWorks division of HP's Technology Solutions Group.

[lordeagle]

This is distusting! 3 weeks after announcing they were getting rid of 24,000 employees they decide they can throw $360M to buy another company, and probably also fire a third of that company's employees.

[thesantechnologist]

This is an interesting time for a start-up company like LeftHand Networks to be bought up. I am sure that the original exit strategy would have been to IPO, however, with the current state of economy, no one should really be going public.

I wrote about this purchase on my blog.

http://thesantechnologist.com/?p=135

[kaibelf]

They are only getting rid of duplicate jobs because of another acquisition. That's the way things work.

[stlwest]

Left Hand is basically just software that allows a server to become an ISCSI SAN. So it integrates very well with HP and will help them sell more servers loaded with disks. Probably a good move for HP. Of course ISCSI allows for virtualization which could mean fewer servers, but that is an industry trend they can't really fight.

[Sakamura]

I'm ok with this acquisition as long as HP is not providing the support for current LeftHand customers.

HP Support is terrible!