LeftHand Networks, an HP company, announced last week an entry-level storage area network solution that improves performance and reduces storage costs in virtualised server environments for midsize businesses.

The LeftHand SAS Starter SAN helps customers efficiently deploy their first virtualisation 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. 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 per cent reduction in the cost per gigabyte of disk drive capacity than the previous generation. The solution’s storage capacity has increased 33 per cent to 12 terabytes 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.