I was asked by a prospective customer the other day, “What does LeftHand sell? After reading your website, it appears that you’re a storage software company.” LeftHand’s SAN/iQ software is at the core of every LeftHand SAN, providing comprehensive SAN management functionality along with high performance clustering and remote replication. But we sell more than just software: We sell SANs.
Customers come to us for SAN storage solutions that are a combination of software and hardware. LeftHand combines SAN/iQ software with tier-one disk hardware platforms and sells them as fully integrated, reliable, high performance SANs. Our customers use LeftHand SAN storage for Exchange, SQL Server, Oracle, file sharing, and many other applications.
SAN/iQ software has market leading virtualization capabilities that are similar to VMware’s software, but at the storage device level. And now we’re taking virtualization of storage beyond the physical SAN with a version of SAN/iQ that runs in a VMware virtual machine on VI3 servers called the Virtual SAN Appliance (VSA). VSA rescues stranded storage that’s inside your servers and gathers it into a shared pool of storage. In other words, VSA combines the storage inside or directly attached to multiple VI3 servers into a centrally managed, shared SAN that can be provisioned as required to each server. VSA also allows you to take advantage of a wide range of enterprise-class SAN features, such as snapshots, thin provisioning, and replication to remote and branch offices.
There you have it: LeftHand sells complete iSCSI SAN solutions, and our SAN/iQ or SAN/iQ VSA software is integrated into every one of them.
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