HP has emerged as apparent winner in a bidding competition with Dell to acquire storage vendor 3Par, ending a back-and-forth that lasted more than two weeks. Dell announced Thursday that it would not raise its offer beyond its latest bid to buy the company for about $1.8bn, or $27 per share ÔÇô a substantially lower offer than the $33-per-share one HP made Thursday morning. 

Dell Senior Vice President of Corporate Strategy said in a statement, "We took a measured approach throughout the process and have decided to end these discussions." 

By pulling out of the race, Dell is expecting to cash in the $72m break-up fee included in a standing merger agreement with 3Par. The bidding competition started around mid-August, when Dell announced the intent to buy 3Par for $1.15bn, or $18 per share. 

In an earlier statement, HP said the addition of 3Par's storage architecture would accelerate the buyer's Converged Infrastructure strategy, which is to converge servers, storage and networks with facilities and to manage everything through a common platform. 

3Par's proposition is a platform that provides a multi-tenant clustered architecture that enables IT organizations to provide storage as a utility. It is architected for "flexible workload consolidation" and optimized for highly virtualized data centers and cloud computing applications. Features include dynamic tiering and thin provisioning for optimization of storage resources.