The LeftHand Partnership with Microsoft

LeftHand Networks invests in a global partnership with Microsoft, working with their partner programs, product teams, technology centers, and field sales toward a common goal of simplifying the use of storage area networks in Microsoft® Windows® environments. We also share the goals of reducing the total cost of ownership, improving the out-of-box experience, and improving business productivity for our customers. Our partnership is focused in the following areas:

Collaboration to help customers achieve a highly optimized environment with best in class performance, scalability, high availability, and data protection. This helps customers achieve a “Dynamic” IT environment within Microsoft’s IT Infrastructure Framework.
The highest level of certification with all corresponding Microsoft products. The components of a LeftHand SAN are logo qualified with Windows Server 2003 and 2008.
Support of all the storage initiatives within the Windows Server environment, including iSCSI, Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS), Virtual Disk Service (VDS) and Multi-path I/O (MPIO).
Support of new and future product releases such as Unified Communications, Windows Server Hyper-V, System Center Virtual Machine Manager, and future versions of the Microsoft business applications.

LeftHand and Microsoft are dedicated to providing an outstanding marriage of operating environment, storage subsystem, and applications to meet every business-critical IT objective. Microsoft applications are rigorously testing with each SAN/iQ software release, and LeftHand has developed in-house and channel expertise to ensure fast and easy deployments.

Microsoft Exchange Server – Thousands of customers are using Exchange on LeftHand SANs, with some environments exceeding 30,000 mailboxes.
Microsoft SQL Server – From environments with hundreds of small, custom databases to huge mission-critical SQL applications, SAN/iQ software is optimized to provide the best price / performance in the industry for SQL Server databases.
System Center Data Protection Manager – For customers migrating away from tape backup, DPM and LeftHand provide a state-of-the-art data protection solution for your Windows environment.
Microsoft SharePoint Server and Office SharePoint Server – LeftHand provides the ideal SAN for this fast-growing application, because our SANs are scalable, highly available, and flexible ,giving customers the ability to accommodate change without downtime and re-configuration.