LeftHand Networks, a provider of iSCSI storage area network (SAN) solutions, has announced support for VMware Infrastructure 3, which includes VMware ESX Server 3.0 and its native iSCSI initiator.

LeftHand's Open iSCSI SAN technology combined with VMware offers customers virtualized, highly available and scalable server and storage environments, thereby reducing IT costs and simplifying overall IT management.

VMware's virtualization software allows customers to divide individual servers into multiple virtual machines, offering customers greater hardware utilization and flexibility. The company claims its LeftHand SAN/iQ software transforms industry-standard platforms into virtual storage modules, allowing users to easily consolidate storage and manage data protection.

Customers can benefit from LeftHand's storage clustering, and scale their Open iSCSI SANs as they add more applications and/or virtual machines to the virtualized server infrastructure.

When VMware and the LeftHand SAN are used together, both server and storage environments are protected from hardware failure by leveraging VMware's ability to restart a virtual machine on a different platform and LeftHand's ability to stripe and mirror data across the cluster using SAN/iQ Network RAID. This allows a customer to have a highly available virtual server and storage solution that will grow together over time.

"VMware and LeftHand are both leaders in server and storage virtualization. We have consistent goals: to simplify and consolidate IT management for customers," said Karl Chen, LeftHand vice president of marketing. "Virtualization and storage clustering have proven to help LeftHand's 1500-plus customers reduce their IT costs and we're thrilled to continue to support VMware's latest product offering."

LeftHand has been a member of VMware's Technology Alliance Partner Program since late 2004. And according to LeftHand, the two companies have a number of mutual customers benefiting from the partnership.

Posted by David Marshall on August 22, 2006 04:02 PM