Tech firm poised for success
From the Denver Business Journal...
Tech firm poised for success
Lynn Berry-Helmlinger Business Journal Staff Reporter
A 2-year-old startup in Boulder's Lefthand Valley is gaining favor with venture capitalists and analysts alike by pioneering a new type of computer storage and a simplified hardware product to implement it.
Lefthand Networks, which plans to launch its new product -- code named "Sawtooth" -- in the fourth quarter of this year, believes its technology is the next link on the evolutionary chain of computer storage.
"We've got a breakaway technology for network storage that gives customers the performance of storage area networks with the simplicity of network-attached storage," said Bill Chambers, president of Lefthand, who co-founded the company with CTO John Spiers in 1999.
Storage area networks, or SANs, are high-speed subnetworks of shared machines that contain nothing but disks used for storing data. This model of storage is data-centric, which means that this network is dedicated to the storage of data.
A SAN is separate from a local area network or messaging network, which allows it to avoid standard network traffic. This makes it capable of delivering large blocks of data at one time while providing high network performance and flexibility to the companies that use it.
Network attached storage (NAS) uses optimized file servers that are attached to a local area network. This model of storage is network-centric, which means that an individual file can be pulled quickly and directly -- rather than in a block of data -- which is more convenient for users.
NAS can support a variety of systems at the same time, including Windows, UNIX and Apple files; is easy to use; connects to ethernet networks; and can be up and running in about five minutes, according to Chambers.
Despite these benefits, each model has its share of drawbacks.
For instance, SANs are complicated, hard to keep running, expensive and have a distance limitation of 10 kilometers, Chambers said.
He added that NAS doesn't scale up very well meaning that as storage space is added to the servers, performance drops off radically -- and it isn't capable of running large, high-performance databases, such as an Oracle financial database, because it runs in a file-based mode. (Large databases require the block-based mode inherent in the SAN.)
Due to these drawbacks, most large enterprise companies use a combination of both SAN and NAS architecture to cover all of their storage needs -- which are multiplying rapidly. In fact, International Data Corp. predicts that storage capacity demand will increase more than tenfold by 2003.
It is these large enterprises that Lefthand hopes to attract with its new concept of storage, called network unified storage (NUS), which represents the convergence of the block-based SAN and the file-based NAS.
"It basically takes the advantages of both and eliminates the disadvantages," Chambers said.
Dan Tanner, senior analyst for storage and storage management at Aberdeen Group in Boston, agrees.
"They combine these to get all of the benefits in a very inventive way -- unlike anyone else I know," he said. "Lefthand is one of few, if any, companies I know that are doing this NAS/SAN convergence with a capability of doing both block and file servers -- and that's big. And it will get bigger."
The potential of Lefthand's technology has not been lost on venture capitalists, who have rewarded Lefthand in a time when funds for tech startups are at a premium.
The company raised $13 million in the second and third quarters of this year from local funds such as Sequel Venture Partners, Boulder Ventures and Vista Ventures in Boulder, and national investors Portage Ventures and Ironside Ventures.
"We haven't done a lot of new investments this year, but we thought Lefthand had a particularly attractive solution in a very large and growing market," said Tim Connor, a partner with Sequel Venture Partners.
"We liked the ability for the user to very easily scale from a smaller implementation to a much larger implementation, with a very low initial price point," he added.
Lefthand's new hardware product will start at less than $15,000, which may help it grab some market share from SAN giant EMC Corp. and NAS leader Network Appliance, which offer much more expensive solutions.
Kyle Lefkoff, a general partner for Boulder Ventures, said NUS is attractive because it will allow companies to work with the infrastructure they already have in place.
"Most of the big corporations in the world have built out their ethernet WAN [wide area network]," he said. "They didn't do it for storage, but now they're realizing they can use it for other things. Lefthand's solution allows them to store data over the ethernet, instead of relying on an expensive proprietary infrastructure called Fibre Channel."
Chambers expects a good response to Lefthand's new product, which is currently in beta testing. He expects his company, which employs just under 50 people, to taste success as well -- provided that it continues to focus on what's important: helping IT managers find time -- and cost-effective ways -- to do their jobs.
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