Los Angeles Valley College Wins Best Practices in Storage Award at SNW 2008 with LeftHand Networks' Virtualization and Multi-Site SANS

Business Wire, Oct 23, 2008

SAN Solutions Help Maximize IT Effectiveness, Minimize Costs, Optimize Space and Simplify Storage Management

BOULDER, Colo. -- LeftHand Networks, the leading provider of highly available iSCSI SANs that optimize virtual environments, today announced that its customer, Los Angeles Valley College (LA Valley College), has been recognized by IDG's Computerworld and the Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) as the winner of Storage Networking World's (SNW) Fall 2008 Best Practices in Storage in the category of Innovation and Promise. The award recognizes LA Valley College for its use of LeftHand Networks' storage networking technology to help transform its monolithic infrastructure to its current "Virtual First" policy and virtual IT environment. The award also marks the second consecutive year that a LeftHand Networks' customer has received the Best Practices in Storage honor.

LA Valley College is one of nine colleges in the Los Angeles Community College District, and is the largest community college system in the United States. With a mission of providing affordable, accessible and practical education opportunities, LA Valley College has embraced an innovative and forward-thinking approach to its IT operations and investments. Recognizing the power of virtualization, LA Valley College was an early adopter and started transforming its infrastructure in 2002.

"With virtualization technologies and solutions from LeftHand Networks, we have successfully and cost-effectively deployed a reliable Exchange email system for 20,000 users as well as multi-site disaster recovery solutions that maximize IT effectiveness, minimize costs, optimize limited space and are easy to deploy and manage," said Jorge Mata, chief information officer (provisional), Los Angeles Community College District.

By installing LeftHand Networks' Virtualization and Multi-Site SANs, which operate on HP server platforms, LA Valley College was able to:

* Achieve greater data availability

* Improve disaster recovery, business continuity and business agility

* Introduce a shared backup system across the entire campus

* Incorporate blade server technology to reduce space needed for servers

* Enable remote management of the data center

* Lower its power consumption

* Save significantly in software, hardware and support costs

LA Valley College's IT team didn't stop there. "We are already looking ahead to how virtualization will drive next generation data centers - creating on-demand, lights-out data centers that will incorporate leading-edge technologies and remote management capabilities that will well serve our students, faculty and staff," added Mata.

"This year's honorees represent a variety of organizations, all of which have unlocked the true value of networked storage and its strategic importance to their businesses," said Ron Milton, executive vice president of Computerworld. "The honorees have demonstrated continued excellence in the use of storage technology and have overcome extraordinary business challenges."

A wide range of IT end user companies and organizations responded to the initial call for nominations. Twenty finalists in four categories including Innovation and Promise; Selecting and Deploying Storage Networks; Planning, Designing and Building a Strategic Storage Infrastructure; and Storage Reliability and Data Recovery were evaluated by a panel of enterprise and storage industry experts. All finalist evaluations were based on case study submissions that profiled the company, its IT department and storage challenges as well as application deployment details, summaries of the key technology used, the process by which it made its SAN selection and measurable solutions benefits.

The awards were announced during a special awards ceremony at SNW Fall 2008 at the Gaylord Texan Resort and Conference Center in Dallas, Texas.

About LeftHand Networks

Founded in 1999, LeftHand Networks pioneered IP-based storage area networks (SANs). SANs built using LeftHand's SAN/iQ[R] software are uniquely able to distribute and protect data across a cluster of industry-standard storage servers. The company's patented architecture increases data availability, allows users to start small and grow the SAN seamlessly, and simplifies management. The LeftHand SAN is ideal for storage and server consolidation, multi-site SANs, and disaster recovery. LeftHand SANs are available in the U.S., Canada and throughout Europe. For more information, contact LeftHand at info@lefthandnetworks.com.

About Computerworld

Computerworld is the leading source of technology news and information for IT influencers worldwide. Computerworld's award-winning Web site (www.computerworld.com), weekly publication, focused conference series and custom research form the hub of the world's largest (40 edition) global IT media network. In the past five years alone, Computerworld has won more than 100 awards, including Folio Magazine's 2006 Gold EDDIE Award for the best technology/computing magazine, the 2004 and 2006 Magazine of the Year Award, and 2006 Best Overall Web Publication from the American Society of Business Publication Editors (ASBPE). In addition, in 2007 Computerworld's then editor in chief, Don Tennant, received the prestigious Timothy White Award from American Business Media. Computerworld leads the industry with an online audience of over 2 million unique, monthly visitors and a print audience of 1,222,000 readers each week (IntelliQuest CIMS Spring 2007).