3PAR
More info
- Released
- 1999–2010
- Type
- Enterprise storage
- Successor
- Acquired by HP
The enterprise-storage company whose thin provisioning was good enough to touch off a bidding war between HP and Dell.
3PAR, founded in 1999 in California, built enterprise storage around a custom ASIC and an idea that was unusual at the time: thin provisioning. Instead of carving out all the disk an application might ever need, the system handed out space only as it was actually written — utilization went up and purchases got pushed into the future.
Fame arrived in 2010 in the form of a bidding war. Dell made an offer, HP countered, and after a few weeks of escalation HP bought the company for about $2.35 billion — roughly three times Dell's opening bid. The product lived on as HP 3PAR StoreServ and competed with EMC and NetApp on the SAN shelf.