Info Tech: September 08, 2010 eNewsLetter |
Cloud storage solutions provider IceWeb seems to be excited with the recent bidding offered by PC manufacturers Hewlett-Packard (News - Alert) and Dell for Unified Data Storage and building blocks for cloud storage networks.
"We are seeing some very exciting activity in the data storage market over the past few years. The recent bidding war for data storage provider 3PAR between Hewlett-Packard and Dell has triggered a great deal of attention to the sector," said John R. Signorello, Chairman and CEO of IceWEB (News - Alert), Inc., in a statement.
The bidding was first initiated by Hewlett-Packard Co. on Monday, August 23, 2010, when the company offered $1.8 billion bid for data-storage provider 3PAR Inc. The amount offered by the company was one-third higher than the price submission by Dell (News - Alert). On Friday, August 27, Dell also offered $1.8 billion, but again, HP out-bid the company and came up with $2 billion bid. HP also offered $33 per share and decided the final amount of $2.35 billion, which might have disappointed Dell.
3PAR is considered to be an effective way for "cloud computing" businesses more prominent by cutting data storage expenditure. It will also enable the bidder to deliver software, data storage and other services to customers via the Internet throughout the world.
Merger and acquisition activities are also being measured to set extraordinary cash records. It is also apparent by another $7.68 billion deal between Intel Corp. and McAfee (News - Alert) Inc. on Thursday, August 19, 2010. According to Capital IQ, a division of Standard & Poor's, it is the biggest deal that has taken place in recent years.
In 2009, EMC (News - Alert) , in 2008, HP and in 2008, Dell also showed such extravaganza when these companies bid for Data Domain common stock for $33.50 per share, LeftHand Networks for $360 million and EqualLogic for $1.4 billion respectively.
According to Senior Analyst James E Bagley of Storage Strategies NOW, IceWEB's Unified Storage "Has a combination of technologies to maximize the capacity efficiency of the storage infrastructure. Built in compression ensures that highly compressible files are stored efficiently. Thin Provisioning means that blocks are not allocated until written to, meaning the administrators can assign arbitrarily large volumes to servers without paying the penalty of a lot of wasted space.”
“The most significant advantage is inline deduplication,” he continued. “Similar files used by multiple servers or virtual desktops are stored as single images within the storage pool. This can result in efficiencies as high as 95 percent in environments with many similar servers. This combination of features is unprecedented and together means that the overall cost per usable terabyte is one of the best in the industry."
Bidding Companies are bound to offer something unique that can attract customers/shareholders and make their lives profitable. James E Bagley rightly states that it should increase the overall capacity of the technology.
Rahul Arora is a TMCnet contributor. He has worked as an editor and freelance writer for several reputed organizations in India. To read more of his articles, please visit his columnist page.
