Lefthand’s storage network grows with clients’ needs

BOULDER – Out with the old and in with the new is the guiding philosophy at LeftHand Networks in Boulder. At the same time, keep the product affordable and the customer coming back for more.

“I think people have a huge problem with storage,´ said Bill Chambers, president and chief executive officer of LeftHand Networks. “Existing solutions have missed the mark. Despite what’s going on with the economy or the Internet bubble bursting, the need to store information has continued to go up.”

LeftHand touts its network unified storage concept as a way companies can rearrange, reorganize, store and manage their data as they grow, said Chambers, who has been involved in three previous start-up companies, including Tango Technologies, where he met John Spiers, one of LeftHand’s co-founders.

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“We’re taking advantage of increased network speeds and the decreased cost of processors,´ said Dave DuPont, vice president of marketing and business development at LeftHand. He said that much of today’s data storage model no longer applies.

LeftHand has created its storage network by combining the strengths and eliminating the weaknesses of storage area networks (SAN) and network attached storage (NAS). By themselves, SAN and NAS have limitations, Chambers said.

SAN, a common high-speed networking architecture that excels at delivering large blocks of data, is limited by distance, expense and complexity. NAS, a server that connects to a local area network and allows for more content to be stored on the network in file form, performs less well as storage capacity is added, and it isn’t capable of running giant databases, such as Oracle.

“What people want to do is combine storage area networks and network attached storage,´ said Dan Tanner, a senior analyst with the Aberdeen Group in Boston. “And that is what LeftHand is doing with its network unified storage product line.”

Scheduled for launch in mid-November, LeftHand’s storage product, less than two inches thick and about the size of a slim briefcase with a price tag of $15,000, will sit in parallel configuration on an Ethernet network. Each of the as-yet-unnamed storage devices holds two processors and four drives with a total of two terabytes, or 2,000 gigabytes, of space.

Instead of saddling a company with enormous storage capacities that it is not ready to use and can barely afford, LeftHand allows a customer to buy the amount of storage space it needs initially and add more as needed, simply clipping new modules into place on the network.

As an example of this clustered storage model, Chambers points out rows of storage modules that neatly fit on top of one another in a laboratory at the company’s facility on Arapahoe Avenue in Boulder.

LeftHand employs about 42 people, but hopes to have 75 to 100 by the middle of next year. Earlier this year, it closed on a $13 million round of funding that involved Boulder-based investors Sequel Venture Partners, Boulder Ventures and Vista Ventures.

The company, which was founded in 1999 by Chambers, Spiers, Zbigniew Soboleski, Sebastian Soboleski and Kelly Long, got its name from the multiple brainstorming sessions the men held at the Left Hand Brewery in Longmont. It is currently beta testing its storage solution at several companies.

“We have more people who want to be on the beta list than we can support,´ said Chambers, for whom the testing phase is an important way to get his small start-up established in a crowded industry.

“If it’s new or different, it carries with it the threat of newness itself,” Tanner said.

Chambers knows that LeftHand is not alone in its field, so surmounting the uncertainty factor that exists in the market is critical for the company. “The challenge that we have now is that there are a lot of competitors out there. We need to cut through the noise,” he said.

Competitors include BlueArc Corp., StorageApps, which was recently acquired by Hewlett-Packard, and TrueSAN Networks Inc.

On TrueSAN’s Web site, analyst Tanner is quoted in a white paper describing the company’s technology in a way that sounds similar to LeftHand’s approach.

“TrueSAN combines block-oriented storage area network and file-oriented network attached storage with unified administration ? hammering the storage management nail cost on the head,” Tanner wrote.

But LeftHand’s DuPont said Tanner’s description of TrueSAN’s storage technology is deceptively general and does not address the complex distinctions between LeftHand and TrueSAN. With regard to most of LeftHand’s competitors, DuPont said they tend to take a higher-end SAN approach, rather than the unique unified SAN and NAS approach LeftHand has developed and for which it has received three broad patents.

LeftHand plans to primarily target large enterprise companies with its product –those in the service provider, financial and storage sectors. Its secondary markets will include companies in the oil and gas, telecommunications, and biomedical and pharmaceutical fields. Contact John Aguilar at (303) 440-4950 or e-mail jaguilar@bcbr.com.