Three years after its IPO, 3PAR set off one of the loudest bidding wars in tech. Dell and HP traded offers for the Fremont, California storage maker through the late summer of 2010, and the price more than doubled. The prize was an idea 3PAR called utility storage: arrays that handed out disk space as it was needed, the way a power company hands out electricity. Cloud computing made that idea suddenly valuable.

Storage Sold Like Power

3PAR began operations in May 1999. Its co-founders, Jeffrey Price and Ashok Singhal, built the InServ Storage Server arrays, run by the InForm software suite, for large companies, service providers, government agencies and fast-growing web firms. The pitch was simplicity and efficiency. Customers could carve one shared pool of storage into many virtual pieces, instead of buying dedicated disks for every application.

From $14 to a Bidding War

3PAR sold 7.5 million shares at $14 each in November 2007 and listed on NYSE Arca under the symbol PAR. Goldman Sachs led the offering. In August 2010 Dell agreed to buy the company. HP jumped in with a higher bid, and the two companies raised their offers again and again. HP won at $33 a share in cash, about $2.35 billion, and closed the deal that September.

Cover: Medieval Granary in the Roman Campagna, Unknown artist. Art Institute of Chicago, public domain. Chosen for a granary (stored harvest).