Wow - it's been a busy week at StorageWorks and Lee still can't post his own blog so I'll post this for him on today's news that we have signed a definitive agreement to acquire LeftHand Networks, Inc..  Here is Lee's post: 

As the dust settles on the announcement of the HP & Oracle Exadata machine, along comes another interesting announcement.  HP has signed a definitive agreement to acquire LeftHand Networks (See press release).  I'm sure a lot of press and analyst opinion will focus on the benefits to HP of beefing up our iSCSI portfolio or gaining access to some of the strong server and storage virtualization capabilities of the LeftHand Networks solution, or of the opportunity to sell to more mid-market customers with HP storage or even on the channel synergies and worldwide expansion opportunities of the acquisition.

These are all true but what are the customer benefits?   An interesting fact is a software solution that builds storage products from industry standard servers.  HP Extreme Data Storage System, HP & Oracle Exadata Machine & LeftHand Networks are all very different in their target market, and yet all build from Industry Standard ProLiant and/or BladeSystem components.  They all layer on strong SW capabilities that turn industry standard servers into robust storage solutions.  LeftHand Networks delivers a very strong software stack featuring Snap & Clone technology, thin provisioning, remote replication and SmartClone capabilities and each of these has considerable customer benefit.  LeftHand Networks even offers the capability to run storage services in a virtual machine.  Imagine that - building a SAN without having to buy storage hardware.  Now that really sounds like a customer benefit!

Lee Johns, Director StorageWorks Marketing