Dell got its name in the papers late last year when it bought EqualLogic. HP followed suit Wednesday when it said that it was buying EqualLogic’s iSCSI rival LeftHand Networks, the nine-year-old storage virtualization and iSCSI/SAN ISV, for around $360 million cash.

Dell paid $1.4 billion cash for its acquisition, a record for Dell.

The privately held LeftHand has had at least $75 million in funding and is thought to do about $100 million a year now.

LeftHand caters to mid-size companies and remote offices or branches of large corporations. It claims 11,000 installations across 3,000 different customers and 500 resellers and distributors worldwide.

HP said LeftHand’s portfolio will extend HP’s virtualization solutions to the mid-market and will be added to HP’s mid-range iSCSI solutions.

The Colorado company’s software runs on existing storage and industry-standard server hardware and nudges accounts into SANs. Its stuff is already certified on HP’s hardware and can be fashioned into virtual appliances.

It also said that LeftHand’s intelligent cloning technology can reduce the amount of disk space required for storage by up to 97%, in certain virtualized environments, while its thin provisioning features reduce power consumption by minimizing storage over-provisioning.

LeftHand also has advanced data replication technology with bandwidth management and failover protection that can be used for backup and disaster recovery operations between remote offices and a central location.

The deal is supposed to close by the end of January. LeftHand has some 215 people. It’s unclear how many will make the jump to HP’s StorageWorks unit.