Dell bolstered its storage portfolio and strengthened its entry into enterprise storage Monday with the acquisition of 3PAR for $1.15 billion. The acquisition of the 11-year-old company, which has had success competing with EMC, HP, Hitachi Data Systems and IBM for high-end enterprise storage, follows on Dell’s acquisition of Ocarina Networks last month.
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3PAR is known for its innovation with storage technologies such as thin provisioning, thin space reclamation and automated data movement. Its modular storage arrays with their multi-tenant capabilities will be an asset for Dell in rounding out its portfolio which consists of Dell PowerVault, EqualLogic, Dell/EMC and Ocarina Network’s storage.
Brad Anderson, Dell senior vice president, Enterprise Product Group couldn’t have said better of 3PAR’s value to Dell: “Its scale-out architecture is tailor-made for public and private cloud computing, empowering organizations to treat storage as a utility.”
With the acquisition, Dell storage will now span from low-end to high-end systems.
The deal for $18 per share cash – an 86.5% premium — is expected to close before the end of the year. 3PAR is based in Fremont, Calif., and has 668 employees. Dell expects to add to the company’s sales and engineering teams.
Among 3PAR’s 300 customers are the New York Stock Exchange, Verizon and Credit Suisse. The company estimates that between 6,000 and 10,000 use an InServ storage system for IT as a service.
