Shooting up eight places to steal the No. 1 spot is LeftHand Networks, following consistent customer traction and a ton of new funding.

LeftHand, which makes Ethernet-based storage arrays, just won $20 million in a Series B round, bringing its total equity investment to date to $39 million. VCs backing the Boulder, Colo., startup say the solid quarter-after-quarter sales uptick convinced them to step up their support of the company (see LeftHand Snatches $20M).
It’s hard to argue with these recent customer wins:

• Denver Museum of Nature and Science,
• Fresno Pacific University,
• Ingersoll-Rand,
• Los Angeles Valley College,
• Mapics Inc.,
• Quoizel Inc., and
• Wiss Janey Elstner Associates.

Previous customers include Lockheed Martin Corp., Array BioPharma, and the City and County of Denver (see Engineers Take LeftHand Turn).

The management team at LeftHand is a reliable, seasoned bunch, too, which certainly helps. Bill Chambers, founder, president, and CEO was formerly president and CEO of General Electric's Asia/Pacific-based technology businesses and has held key management positions in both startups and Fortune 500 companies. John Spiers, founder and CTO, was director of engineering at Maxtor Corp. (NYSE: MXO - message board). David Bangs, VP of sales and marketing, was most recently VP of Americas sales at Quantum Corp. (NYSE: DSS - message board); and Dr. Mark Hayden, chief software architect, founded North Fork, which LeftHand acquired last year (see LeftHand Grabs North Fork).

And did we mention that two of Byte and Switch's editors are left-handed? We're huge fans of all things sinistral. The story behind the company's name, by the way, is that the founders were out one evening enjoying some liquid gold produced by the Left Hand Brewing Co., based in Longmont, Colo. The name clicked, and it stuck. (Things might have been worse. They could have been knocking back the Old Peculier.)

The one criticism we do have of LeftHand is its reluctance so far to support iSCSI. It uses a proprietary technology, the Advanced Ethernet Block Storage (AEBS) protocol, rather than the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) specification. Customers must load LeftHand's AEBS software on their servers, and it enables various storage virtualization services. Company executives say once iSCSI gains acceptance LeftHand will support it, but we generally prefer champions of new technology rather than stragglers.

Still, in LeftHand’s case, lack of iSCSI support clearly isn’t holding the company back yet.