3Par acquisition closed
HP on Monday delivered a one-two-three announcement punch, declaring a completion of its acquisition of storage company 3Par, ridding six of its internal data centers of Cisco WAN products and unveiling a new disk-storage array it said would double energy efficiency and slash in half data center floor-space requirements over its predecessors.

HP ripped 3Par out of Dell's teeth, following a more-than-two-week bidding competition in which the buying price rose from $1.15bn to $2.35bn. Dell was first to strike a buy-out deal with the provider of multi-tenant storage technology in mid-August. The announcement was followed by a succession of gradually rising offers from HP and Dell until Dell finally stopped at $1.8bn in early September, claiming the $72m break-up fee in its merger agreement with 3Par.

Dave Donatelli, executive VP and general manager for HP's Enterprise Servers, Storage and Networking division, said the merger would help accelerate the buyer's Converged Infrastructure strategy, which is to converge servers, storage and networks with facilities and to deliver the ability to manage all of these assets through a common management platform, according to the company's website.

"We intend to invest in 3Par's technology to create long-term value for our stakeholders," Donatelli said in a statement.

3Par provides highly virtualized multi-tenant storage arrays designed for public and private cloud deployments. The product takes advantage of thin provisioning and other storage-virtualization technologies. HP says the technology will enable clients to maximize storage utilization, balance workloads and automate storage tiering.

HP raises storage density and energy efficiency
The new StorageWorks P9500 Disk Array HP unveiled on Monday also has automatic storage tiering capabilities, using the company's P9000 Smart Tiers software. Additionally, the vendor says the product increases the amount of data that can be managed by one administrator.

P9500 is two-times more energy efficient than the previous generations of HP storage arrays, while also requiring half the physical space for the same storage capacity, according to HP's internal research.

No more Cisco WAN gear in HP data centers
Finally, HP engineers have replaced all non-HP core WAN routers and switches connecting six of its internal data centers with HP gear, delivering on its earlier promise to become "Cisco-free". HP replaced Cisco switches and routers its A-series networking products.

"This past April we said we'd be Cisco-free for core WAN routing and switching in our data centers, and we are," Ken Gray, HP's VP of infrastructure for global IT, said in a statement. "Our engineers have done a great job proving it's possible to run a network for a company the size and scale of HP on our own products;and we did the migration without taking a data center offline."

The data centers are located in Houston, Austin and Atlanta ÔÇô two in each city. The facilities are a culmination of an enterprise-wide data center consolidation project, in which HP consolidated more than 85 data centers worldwide into the six new facilities.