HP can't let 3Par get away

With more cash to spend and a bigger reputation to lose, HP will end up with 3Par and maintain its standing as a full-service enterprise tech firm

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The bidding war between Dell and HP over storage vendor 3Par may come as a surprise to the casual observer. After all, we've seen plenty of acquisitions in the storage space of late, none of which have featured high-profile head butting among tech powerhouses.

This is more than just a contest for a relatively young company with an impressive line of storage technologies, though. The winner -- almost certain to be the deeper-pocketed HP -- will come away with a far more robust cloud-ready portfolio to compete with the likes of Oracle, IBM, and EMC, all of whom have a head start with technologies groomed for handling massive quantities of data.

[ Are your storage requirements out of control? Then start by eliminating data redundancy. InfoWorld contributor Keith Schultz lays it all out in our Deep Dive Report on Data Deduplication. | Keep up with the latest approaches to managing information overload and staying compliant in InfoWorld's Enterprise Data Explosion newsletter. ]

First, a recap of recent storage acquisitions: IBM this year scooped up data-compression specialist Storwize and deduplication purveyor Diligent Technologies. Dell grabbed Ocarina Networks, also a maker of dedupe technology (not to mention a partner of HP). EMC picked up Greenplum, a data warehousing and analytics specialist. NetApp consumed Bycast to improve its object-based storage capabilities. There are plenty of others. Meanwhile, vendors such as Oracle have rolled out their own enterprise-oriented data-warehousing offerings.