Dell has reached an agreement to acquire virtualized storage provider 3PAR in a transaction valued at $1.15 billion. The deal announced Monday, which has already been approved by the two companies’ boards, is expected to close before the end of this year.
The 3PAR acquisition is expected to add additional muscle to Dell’s line of intelligent data-management offerings. By enabling organizations to treat storage as a utility, Dell executives said, 3PAR gives customers the ability to use and pay for only the capacity and performance they need, and only when they use it.
“The emergence of software as a service, infrastructure as a service, social networking, and cloud computing business models is increasing the need for storage platforms that scale capacity and performance efficiently for massive throughput in a multi-tenant environment,” said Dell Senior Vice President Brad Anderson. “3PAR is the leader in scalable utility storage solutions for the cloud.”
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Anderson characterized the 3PAR deal as “a natural extension” of a strategy that began with Dell’s acquisition of EqualLogic in 2007 and continued this year with the addition of Ocarina Networks and Scalent Networks, together with the assets of Exanet. “3PAR brings the same values of performance, agility and ease of use to higher-end, virtualized storage deployments as EqualLogic does for the entry-level and mid-range,” Anderson said.
Monday’s acquisition of 3PAR moves Dell up the SAN tier to offer a choice of midrange and high-end storage solutions, Anderson told financial analysts on a conference call. The move targets customers that require “utility storage and highly virtualized server environments,” Anderson said.
Dell has been aligning its storage offerings over the last several years to provide customers choice and value, Anderson observed. For example, Ocarina’s content-aware deduplication app is central to Dell’s plan for delivering intelligent storage management over a unified environment,…