Hardware vendor Dell has acquired Compellent, a maker of virtualised storage infrastructure products, for $820 million.
Minnesota-based Compellent’s flagship product is Storage Centre, a storage area network (SAN) system that includes automated data management features such as storage tiering and thin provisioning.
Dell says that the addition of Compellent will help its customers "reduce storage costs and dramatic simplify the management of IT infrastructure".
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"Compellent’s design focus on intelligently managing data to increase efficiency, agility and resiliency is consistent with Dell’s approach of building solutions that can quickly scale to meet the most demanding enterprise environment," commented Brad Anderson, senior vice president of Dell’s enterprise product group.
Virtualised storage solutions have emerged as a strong point of interest to IT vendors this year as their customers shift infrastructure to cloud computing environments. A virtualised approach to storage is said to allow organisations to easier manage a distributed storage environment.
In August 2010, Dell said that it had reached an agreement to buy 3PAR, another virtualised storage provider, for $1.15 billion. However, a bidding war with IT Hewlett-Packard ensued and the price of 3PAR more than doubled within the space of a few weeks.
In early September, Hewlett-Packard agreed a $2.4 billion deal to acquire 3PAR. That price represented an 87% premium on 3PAR’s total market value.
In its most recent financial quarter, Compellent reported 31% year-on-year growth in sales to $42.1 million. Net income stood at $3.3 million.
