Dell regroups after 3Par battle

Dell is to concentrate on developing previous acquisitions following its failure to buy virtualisation-friendly storage company 3Par.

Dell, which lost a multi-billion dollar bidding war to HP over 3Par at the beginning of September, will develop its Exanet and Ocarina Networks acquisitions to fufill its high-end virtualised storage requirements, Dell manager Hugh Jenkins told ZDNet UK on Thursday.

"One of the key components is Exanet," said Jenkins, who is Dell's head of public sector enterprise marketing in EMEA. "The vision there is to be able to bring a unified storage architecture and break down the lines of demarcation between file and block-based storage."

Dell bought the intellectual property of network-attached-storage company Exanet in February, after the company went into receivership. Jenkins said that Dell was working on how Exanet technology could plug into a virtualised environment, including virtualised storage and thin provisioning.

In July Dell said that it would acquire data deduplication company Ocarina Networks. Dell is now looking at how to take Ocarina file deduplication and build it into a range of different technologies, said Jenkins.

Dell announced its intention to buy 3Par in August, for $1.15bn (£734m) in cash. That offer was quickly trumped by HP, after which a rapid bidding process upped the price of 3Par to $2.4bn. Dell bowed out of the battle at the beginning of September.