HP acquired one of the last independent iSCSI storage vendors last week in a $360 million all-cash deal. The company snapped up LeftHand Networks to bolster its small and mid-range storage offerings and be able to give its customers a broad storage offering. HP will be able to leverage LeftHand’s iSCSI expertise in its up-to-now paltry iSCSI hardware.

The deal follows another iSCSI deal this year – that of Dell’s acquisition of EqualLogic in January 2008. HP's buy will position the vendor to attack the growing iSCSI market. LeftHand has a lot of those customers – it claims as many as 11,000 implementations in 3,000 customers.

HP will add LeftHand’s SAN software and its Network Storage Modules to its StorageWorks line along with its All-in-One, Enterprise Virtual Arrays and Modular Smart Arrays. LeftHand’s SAN/iQ software runs on commodity x86 servers and has been bundled by resellers with HP ProLiant servers for over two years now. In contrast, EqualLogic products use their own proprietary storage arrays. LeftHand also introduced a Virtual SAN Appliance that lets an iSCSI SAN run on a virtual machine just as it would do on physical servers.

According to IDC, the iSCSI / IP SAN market is expected to grow to $4.4 billion by 2012.

The acquisition is HP’s second storage acquisition of the year. In March, HP acquired Tower Software, a document and records management software company.

LeftHand was founded in 1999 as a vendor of iSCSI SANs – at the time, iSCSI was a pioneering technology. The company is based in Boulder, Colo., and has 215 employees.

Deni Connor is principal analyst for Storage Strategies NOW.