LeftHand Picks Up iSCSI

LeftHand Networks may have been one of the first companies to dive head-first into the IP SAN pool, but many industry observers predicted that the companys proprietary IP protocol could also be its biggest shortcoming.

The IP storage startup appears to have heeded their warnings: Today LeftHand announced that it finally supports standard iSCSI protocol (see LeftHand Integrates iSCSI, Replicates).

“They have been around the longest, and they have the most installations, but it was clear that if they didn’t have iSCSI, they’d get killed,” says Enterprise Storage Group Inc. analyst Steve Duplessie. "When there are standards, you don’t want to get caught on the sideline... They had to get it, and they did."

LeftHand already has more than 200 customers across various industries for its IP SAN solutions, which use its proprietary Advanced Ethernet Block Storage (AEBS) protocol. The company said today that it expects to start shipping its Network Storage Module (NSM) with support for standard iSCSI in January 2004.

Customers will be able to choose between AEBS and iSCSI at no extra charge, according to Tom Major, LeftHand’s VP of marketing. LeftHand's current customers can upgrade their NSMs through a software code load, he says.The move to iSCSI is a definite change of tune for the Boulder, Colo.-based company, which has continuously claimed that its proprietary protocol is actually faster, is easier to use, and offers more intelligence than iSCSI. And, in fact, Major continues to reiterate that claim. While data can automatically be sent over AEBS to the appropriate Network Storage Module in a cluster, he says, iSCSI only has the ability to talk to a single NSM, which then has to redistribute the data to the appropriate module. “There’s a slight performance difference in some situations,” he contends.

In addition, Major says, LeftHand’s customers simply haven’t been asking for iSCSI. “Our users have not been screaming for it yet,” he says. “Most of the criticism has come from our competitors, not from our customers.”

So why, after resisting for so long, has LeftHand finally decided to conform to industry standards?

Major insists that the company was never against iSCSI. It simply got into the game before the protocol had become a standard. Now, he says, going with the standard will allow the company more opportunities to partner, and will also allow it to play in more operating environments.

In addition to its upcoming iSCSI support, LeftHand also announced an add-on Remote IP Copy feature to its SAN/iq Distributed Storage Matrix (DSM) software, for off-site disaster recovery. The software, which enables snapshots and replication of data among multiple locations, will be available on November 1, with prices starting at $8,700.And finally, the company says it will start shipping a new version of its NSM hardware on Nov. 1. The NSM200 offers 1.2 Tbytes of storage, and carries a list price of $18,500.

— Eugénie Larson, Senior Editor, Byte and Switch