Deal’s done: Dell buys storage firm Compellent for $960 mln

By Geoff Duncan December 13, 2010

Image used with permission by copyright holder

Computer maker Dell will be augmenting its storage business by acquiring Compellent in a deal valued at about $960 million. The deal will serve to bolster Dell’s storage business, primarily targeted at enterprise, large organizations, and data centers, particularly as the company works to get a slice of the growing market for cloud-based storage and applications as well as virtualized servers.

“The Compellent storage platform will enable Dell to provide customers additional mid- and high-end network storage solutions that simplify and reduce the cost of data management,” said Dell senior VP for enterprise products Brad Anderson, in a statement. “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.”

Dell plans to integrate Compellent services and products with its existing lineup of enterprise storage products, including its EqualLogic and Dell/EMC offerings, along with PowerVault. Compellent’s solutions have sols well into the small- and medium-sized enterprise market segment, along with Fibre Channel capabilities not supported by Dell’s EqualLogic offerings. The trick for Dell will be amplifying Compellent’s products to appeal to large enterprises by increasing scalability and pushing the product toward the vaunted “five nines” of availability: 99.999 percent uptime.

The Compellent acquisition should help Dell remain a top player in the storage field. Although Dell doesn’t have much trouble moving server hardware into enterprises and data centers, rival Hewlett-Packard managed to snap storage outfit 3Par out from under Dell in a bidding war earlier this year, leaving Dell scrambling to augment its storage offerings to remain in the top five storage vendors.

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Geoff Duncan writes, programs, edits, plays music, and delights in making software misbehave. He's probably the only member…

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