HP has upped its bid to buy 3Par, offering a 33.3 percent premium over the buy-out offer by Dell, to which the maker of storage systems agreed earlier this month. HP is attempting to persuade 3Par’s board of directors to cancel the company’s agreement with Dell.

HP is offering to buy all outstanding shares of 3Par for $24 per share, total enterprise value of $1.6bn, according to an HP news release. If approved, HP says the merger would accelerate its Converged Infrastructure strategy. Dell’s bid was $18 per share, or $1.15bn total.

According to a statement by Dave Donatelli, executive VP and general manager of the Enterprise Servers, Storage and Networking division at HP, the bidder’s pitch to the 3Par board is its global reach and strong routes to market.

“We’ve seen great momentum with our Converged Infrastructure strategy, and 3Par accelerates that strategy, particularly in cloud and scale-out markets,” Donatelli said.

The Converged Infrastructure strategy is to deliver an entire data center infrastructure, including servers, storage, networking systems and facilities, managed through a single platform.

3Par’s platform enables providing storage resources as a utility through a multi-tenant clustered architecture. According to the company, it is optimized for highly virtualized data centers and cloud computing applications.

If 3Par’s board accepts HP’s offer, the potential buyer expects to close the transaction by the end of this year.