3PAR

3PAR has taken a swing at the high-end storage market. The company's storage servers and software let clients pool their storage assets across multiple departments or lines of business, consolidating data management while allowing differentiated service levels. Its customers include midsized and large corporations and government agencies. 3PAR targets cloud computing service providers, Web retailers, and financial services firms, among others. It mainly sells directly, utilizing resellers to deal with the US government and some foreign businesses. In 2010 the company was acquired by Hewlett-Packard for about $2.3 billion, after a bidding war between HP and smaller rival Dell. HP outbid Dell by more than 30%.