In a brief but expensive bidding war with Dell, HP has won the bid over enterprise storage vendor 3PAR. The win has HP's solution providers looking forward to the next round of competition in the storage and converged networking markets.
HP bid $33 per share or a total of about $2.4 billion, for 3PAR, causing Dell to officially give up on its bid for the company. 3PAR represents an important prize for Dell and HP as both look for ways to beef up their enterprise storage offerings and look towards cloud computing.
Thin provisioning, when combined with those other services, allows storage customers to avoid purchasing excess storage capacity to meet unexpected future requirements and is fast becoming a key storage feature as customers look to cut hardware acquisition costs as well as the power and cooling cost associated with hardware, as well as a key technology for building cloud infrastructures.
One of HP's challenges with 3PAR will be in its overall storage messaging. HP already has a lot of individual point products in the primary storage space, including its MSA, EVA, LeftHand, Windows-based NAS Servers, IBRIX-based NAS products, and XP, and now it is adding 3PAR.
