H-P Taking on IBM With LeftHand Buy

H-P, which recently announced 24,600 job cuts, is keen to grow its enterprise storage and servers division at a time when customers are struggling with massive data growth. Despite this trend, the ESS business accounted for less than 20% of H-P's recent third-quarter revenue.

LeftHand and H-P already share some history; the startup's software already works with H-P's Proliant and BladeSystem servers, ProCurve Networking devices, and its Insight Control management software.

H-P expects to complete the LeftHand acquisition, which is subject to certain closing conditions, in the fiscal first quarter of 2009.

Shares of H-P were recently down 1.6%. Dell and IBM also traded lower.