Dell Acquires 3PAR For $1.15 Billion
Moving deeper into IT services and cloud computing, Dell Inc. said Monday that it plans to buy 3PAR Inc., a high end data storage company, for $1.15 billion.
Best known for sales of PCs to enterprises and consumers, Dell has been muscling its way into IT services since it acquired Perot Systems for $3.9 billion last year.
The 3PAR deal follows Dell’s 2007 $1.4 billion acquisition of EqualLogic, which gave Dell a solid storage base, but on a lower end than 3PAR’s.
Dell is betting that 3PAR’s thin provisioning approach, which treats storage as a utility, will result in a big payoff for the firm and its customers. The combination of thin provisioning and virtualization, Dell indicated, can overcome the limitations of traditional modular and monolithic arrays.
“3PAR addresses the problem of costly, complex, and rigid IT environments and enables organizations to treat storage as a utility,” said Dell in a release, adding that customers need to pay only for “the capacity and performance they need, and only when they use it.”
3PAR’s technology utilizes a multi-tenant clustered storage architecture, which helps IT organizations build virtualized infrastructures. 3PAR has long maintained that its thin provisioning approach enables customers to better predict performance as they face storage capacity requirements that always seem to be increasing.
It was not immediately clear what impact, if any, the deal with 3PAR will have on Dell’s longtime partnership with EMC on storage, which represents about 25% of Dell’s total storage business, according to industry research estimates. Dell said it plans to integrate 3PAR into its storage portfolio including its Dell/EMC products.
Dell added: “With 3PAR. Dell will offer innovative systems and customer choice at every storage tier, from direct-attach to highly-virtualized clustered SANS.”
Source: InformationWeek
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