HP 3PAR

3PAR, founded in 1999, built enterprise storage around a distinctive idea: chop every disk into small chunks and spread each volume thinly across the whole system (wide striping), with a dedicated ASIC doing the heavy lifting. It popularised thin provisioning — promising more capacity than physically exists and topping up on demand — which saved on expensive disks.

The technology was hot enough to trigger a bidding war in 2010: Dell bid first, HP countered, and the price was driven up to $2.35 billion before HP won. The system lived on as HPE 3PAR StoreServ and became the backbone of many data centres before HPE's newer Primera and Alletra took over the role.