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The bidding war between HP and Dell for data storage company 3PAR is over.
The winner? Hewlett-Packard, with a $2.4 billion offer. That was 83 percent above Dell’s first offer and more than three times what 3Par stock was trading at then.
The only silver lining for Dell?
It is entitled to receive a $72 million break-up fee from 3PAR upon the termination of its merger agreement.
Make sure to read this good article from the AP following Dell’s withdrawal from the bidding war.
Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past few weeks, you’ll be aware that Dell recently agreed to acquire data storage company data storage company 3PAR for for $18 per share or roughly $1.13 billion. Earlier this week, HP proposed to acquire 3PAR instead, offering as much as $24 per share in cash, or roughly $1.6 billion.
Yesterday, Dell matched HP’s bid, offering $24.30 per share, or approximately $1.6 billion.
Didn’t take long for HP to respond, though: the company’s latest offer goes as high as $1.8 billion.
A good old-fashioned bidding war indeed.
Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past few weeks, you’ll be aware that Dell recently agreed to acquire data storage company data storage company 3PAR for for $18 per share or roughly $1.13 billion. Yesterday, HP proposed to acquire 3PAR instead, offering as much as $24 per share in cash, or roughly $1.6 billion.
Dell is obviously studying the situation and, according to a single source cited by Bloomberg this morning, the company is preparing to trump HP’s offer.
3PAR, meanwhile has said a third possible suitor had expressed interest in taking over the company, but that company’s identity hasn’t been revealed.
3PAR announced today that Managed Health Care Associates has saved 50% on storage CAPEX by consolidating onto a single, highly virtualized 3PAR InServ F-Class Storage Server.
With 3PAR, MHA has doubled storage performance and improved VMware server performance while the hyper-efficient design of the InServ F-Class has also lowered MHA’s OPEX, reducing datacenter power consumption by 30% and storage administration time by 80% as compared to MHA’s previous storage environment.
By consolidating onto 3PAR, MHA has gained the scalability to meet anticipated growth without compromising performance. With the move to utility storage and more specifically the InServ F-Class, MHA has seen a 100% performance increase in storage performance and also a dramatic improvement in VMware performance. MHA’s virtual machines (VMs) — all of which leverage 3PAR Utility Storage — run faster with 3PAR than they did with MHA’s traditional storage arrays. This has allowed MHA to better serve the needs of their member pharmacies, which utilize MHA’s services to assist in the purchase of pharmaceuticals and medical supplies and for network access to major national and regional prescription drug plans.
Since deployment, the InServ F-Class has also saved MHA on OPEX by reducing the amount of storage administration time required by their current IT staff by approximately 80% — from several hours per day to only a few hours per month. Additional savings have come in the form of a 60K-BTU reduction in energy consumption over the past year as compared to MHA’s previous storage system — a 30% savings in cooling costs alone.
The InServ F-Class mid-range array has saved MHA a significant amount on storage footprint and up-front capacity costs — a savings of 50% over the purchase of storage from the other vendors they evaluated. A major reason for this savings is that, with 3PAR, MHA no longer has to overpurchase storage capacity because they are unable to predict their future storage needs. For example, when converting physical servers to virtual machines using VMware, MHA was previously forced to purchase more storage up front than was actually required for those VMs. The Thin Built In capabilities of the F-Class, combined with 3PAR Thin Provisioning software, have given MHA the ability to overallocate storage to their virtual servers, thus allowing MHA to reduce their of up-front capacity purchases. In addition, the high port connectivity of the InServ F-Class array has eliminated the need for MHA to invest in additional Fibre Channel switching equipment that would have been required with storage arrays purchased from another vendor.
MHA has also seen a reduction in storage footprint due to the native tiered-storage capabilities of the F-Class. MHA has configured its 3PAR array with both high-performance Fibre Channel drives for performance-intensive production workloads and more cost-efficient Nearline (SATA) drives for disaster recovery from remote 3PAR arrays. MHA’s lab management and testing environments as well as their VMware environment also take advantage of the more economical Nearline drives while other servers use the higher-performance Fibre Channel drives.
3PAR announced today the 3PAR Cloud-Agile program, a new partnership initiative to promote the adoption of cloud computing and cloud-based services offered by leading providers with infrastructures powered by 3PAR Utility Storage. The 3PAR Cloud-Agile program gives partners the opportunity to promote differentiated virtual private array (VPA) and disaster recovery (DR) offerings under the respective names 3PAR Cloud-Agile: SECURED and 3PAR Cloud-Agile: ASSURED.
3PAR created the Cloud-Agile program in response to an increase in demand for enterprise IT delivered as a utility service and a corresponding uptake in 3PAR Utility Storage adoption among leading IT hosting providers. Seven of the world’s top 10 revenue-generating managed service providers as identified by the “Winter 2009 Managed Hosting Report” issued by Tier1 Research use 3PAR Utility Storage as the storage foundation for their cloud-based service offerings.
The Cloud-Agile program is designed to raise awareness for the cost and agility benefits of cloud computing services and encourage the development of a mutually beneficial, robust cloud computing ecosystem. Program participation is limited to leading hosting providers using 3PAR Utility Storage as a strategic element of their cloud-based service offerings.
3PAR Cloud-Agile program participants such as Attenda, DataPipe, Terremark, and Verizon Business say their utility storage infrastructures — built on 3PAR InServ® Storage Servers — have enabled them to distinguish themselves with an agility that is lacking from others in their market. These companies share a significant investment in 3PAR Utility Storage, which has provided a strategic advantage by enabling them to handle unpredictable growth, control costs, accelerate book-to-bill cycles, assure service levels, and efficiently deliver value-added services. For these companies, service request response times have been reduced to minutes versus days, weeks, or even months with 3PAR.
For 3PAR Cloud-Agile partners, 3PAR Utility Storage has also contributed to savings on facilities and infrastructure costs while significantly reducing storage administration time. This has meant improved time-to-revenue, lower storage total cost of ownership (TCO), and tighter alignment between costs and revenues. For example, in a survey of 3PAR’s cloud computing service provider customers, 69% of IT organizations estimated that, by using 3PAR Utility Storage to power their cloud computing services, they have saved 40% or more in total capacity as compared to traditional storage alternatives.
Under the terms of the program, participants receive expert technical training to enhance the quality of the cloud-based services that these providers are able to offer to end users. The program also offers a combination of lead sharing, sales training, and joint marketing to increase selling opportunities and grow awareness of the benefits of cloud computing. In addition, under the program, participating providers have the opportunity to offer enhanced services built on 3PAR Utility Storage under the names 3PAR Cloud-Agile: SECURED and 3PAR Cloud-Agile: ASSURED.
3PAR, global provider of utility storage, is readying an announcement about a development project with Symantec to integrate 3PAR thin provisioning technology with Veritas Storage Foundation to allow granular, automated, non- disruptive space reclamation within the 3PAR storage array. 3PAR and Symantec have teamed together to bring to market an industry first—the automated use of filesystem-level intelligence to continually optimize storage utilization and deliver infrastructure automation.
The joint project between 3PAR and Symantec fosters development aimed at giving Storage Foundation the ability to track the mapping of block-level capacity to thin provisioned volumes on 3PAR InServ Storage Servers. This capability is intended to allow the Veritas File System within Storage Foundation to periodically communicate the location of free blocks to the 3PAR array as file deletions and changes happen within the filesystem. This partnership will enable 3PAR arrays to use this granular filesystem-level information to autonomically reclaim unused space within thinly provisioned virtual volumes, thus maintaining high capacity utilization without impacting host applications.
With this joint effort, 3PAR and Symantec have become the first vendors to announce the development of a granular, intelligent, and automated mechanism for reclaiming unused storage capacity based on the sharing of intelligence gathered at the filesystem level.