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LeftHand Networks Delivers Entry-level SAN for Virtualized Environments

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LeftHand Networks (an HP company) today announced an entry-level storage area network (SAN) solution that improves performance and reduces storage costs within virtualized server environments for midsize businesses.

The LeftHand SAS Starter SAN helps customers efficiently deploy their first virtualization projects by simplifying the process of creating, accessing and managing shared storage resources.
As customers deploy virtual server environments, they frequently encounter unforeseen system performance bottlenecks. To further complicate matters, server virtualization increases the number of required connections to a SAN. This increased system complexity makes it more difficult and costly to troubleshoot when bottlenecks do occur. The LeftHand SAS Starter SAN reduces costs and mitigates these performance issues by automatically balancing data volumes across all disk drives, network connections and processors.
The SAS Starter SAN includes management tools that provide replication, thin provisioning and snapshot capabilities. These capabilities help ensure data availability even as the environment becomes more complex. In addition, customers can purchase only the capacity they need, easily increasing both the capacity and performance of their system without experiencing any disruption. The SAS Starter SAN can scale to more than 80 network ports and 320 disk drives to accommodate business growth.
LeftHand also introduced a higher capacity SATA Starter SAN that offers a 25 percent reduction in the cost per gigabyte (GB) of disk drive capacity than the previous generation. The solution’s storage capacity has increased 33 percent to 12 terabytes (TB) while maintaining its current list price. The SATA Starter SAN is ideal for customers who want to consolidate storage for Microsoft Windows or Linux servers.
The SAS Starter SAN and the higher-capacity SATA Starter SAN are available immediately through LeftHand Networks’ resellers and value-added resellers in the United States as well as value-added distributors throughout Europe.
Pricing starts at $35,000 for the 4.8 TB SAS Starter SAN and $30,000 for the 12 TB SATA Starter SAN.

DataCore Goes After Eastern European Market, Partners With Prosper Intelligence

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DataCore Software and Prosper Intelligence have announced a distribution agreement for Austria and Eastern Europe. Prosper will resell and support SANmelody and SANsymphony™as the SAN and virtual storage component of its virtualization portfolio. Prosper will integrate both SAN software solutions into its showcase “Virtualization Consolidation Academy” (VCA) lab in Vienna.

The Virtualization Consolidation Academy is an innovative knowledge transfer and competence center, which focuses on helping partners and customers evaluate and train and understand virtualization and consolidation technologies. With the agreement, Prosper can provide an end-to-end virtualization portfolio – Total Enterprise Virtualization – to its partner base with the addition of DataCore’s advanced storage virtualization, fault-tolerant SAN and disaster recovery solutions. In addition, DataCore obtains a key distribution partnership with the ability to support and resell into the emerging and growing Eastern European market.

Prosper currently supports a growing base of resellers in Austria and Eastern Europe, who are implementing virtualization and consolidation projects for business-critical applications, servers and data storage. With today’s agreement, DataCore’s storage virtualization technology complements the existing portfolio of desktop, server and application virtualization with a hardware-independent, flexible and cost effective storage solution. The Virtualization Consolidation Academy is seen as an independent review platform that can be used to evaluate, test, train and showcase virtualization solutions and technologies.

DataCore’s virtualization platforms improve the utilization and performance of disk storage, enable a new level of flexibility and hardware independence and reduce the overall cost of storage area networking. With SANmelody, DataCore provides a cost-effective, feature rich SAN solution that includes automated storage management, high availability, disaster recovery and thin provisioning. SANsymphony is the enterprise solution that enables Continuous Data Protection (CDP) and meets the advanced needs of larger organizations in terms of capacity, performance and scalability.

Funding For CiRBA and Virtual Iron, Dell Completes Acquisition of EqualLogic

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More interesting news today:

CiRBA Raises $12 Million With Sigma Partners

CiRBA Inc., today announced that it has raised $12 million in its second round of institutional funding led by Sigma Partners . Existing investors including Edgestone Capital Partners and others also participated in the round. The funding will enable CiRBA to further accelerate growth on a global scale, with investments in sales, marketing and product development.

Virtual Iron Capitalizes on Strong Market Momentum, Raises $20 Million in New Equity Financing

Virtual Iron Software, a provider of enterprise server virtualization software, today announced that it has secured $20 million in new venture equity financing. The funding, provided at an increased valuation, will be used to accelerate product development and expand global sales, marketing and distribution efforts. The investment brings Virtual Iron’s total venture funding to $65 million in invested equity capital and includes Highland Capital Partners, Matrix Partners, Goldman Sachs, Intel Capital and SAP Ventures.

Dell Completes EqualLogic Acquisition

Today Dell completed the EqualLogic acquisition, a leading provider of high-performance storage area network (SAN) solutions designed for virtualization and ease-of-use. The purchase extends Dell’s leadership in simplifying IT for customers.

“Customers face extreme challenges with data growth. Storage solutions that use existing infrastructure, install in minutes not days, manage themselves, can grow easily as needs increase and plug into the virtualized IT ecosystem will help businesses with their storage needs. EqualLogic provides these storage solutions and that’s the incredible value that Dell will now be able to deliver to our customers.  With Dell’s PartnerDirect channel, we will unleash the power of iSCSI and virtualization to redefine the economics of storing and processing data.”