Hewlett-Packard raised the stakes in the competition to acquire storage array vendor 3PAR yesterday, making a $1.6 billion bid that surpasses the $1.15 billion offer Dell made last week for 3PAR.
Dave Donatelli, HP's EVP of enterprise servers, storage and networking, said he is looking for 3PAR to take HP heavily into cloud storage if it closes the deal. 
As with Dell's proposed acquisition of 3PAR, HP's bid would alter the storage landscape and raises questions about its product platform.
Although 3PARs flagship T-Class InServ storage system is positioned as an enterprise play, Donatelli said it can also be considered a midrange platform during a call with financial analysts. He also said HP would maintain its OEM deal with Hitachi for its enterprise XP system, which is the same system that Hitachi Data Systems sells as the USP-V. That means 3PAR may end up replacing HP's midrange EVA line instead.
And while 3PAR is known most for its thin provisioning, Donatelli pointed to its multitenancy capabilities for shared storage and tiering software as making it a good fit for service providers and cloud storage. 3PAR sells modular systems that can be clustered to scale, unlike the monolithic systems with mainframe connectivity that it competes against – such as the EMC Symmetrix, HDS USP-V and IBM DS8000.
Donatelli also denied HP's bid was a reaction to Dell's, and admitted HP made a previous offer for 3PAR.
Analysts expect Dell to make a counter offer, but doesn't see it getting into a prolonged bidding war.
HP has been more aggressive with acquisitions historically, but Dell has ramped up its interest in storage deals since it acquired EqualLogic in early 2008 for $1.4 billion and became the iSCSI SAN market leader. Dell this year acquired the technology of clustered NAS vendor Exanet and bought primary data reduction startup Ocarina Networks.
HP's storage acquisitions over the past few years include LeftHand Networks, scale-out NAS vendors Ibrix and PolyServe, database archiver OuterBay, and SRM vendor AppIQ.