HP and Dell continued a toe-to-toe battle to acquire the storage-system vendor 3Par. The latest bid came from HP, which offered to buy all outstanding shares of 3Par for $30 per share in cash, valuing the company at $2bn.

HP's offer was 11 percent higher than Dell's latest offer to buy the company for $27 per share. 

The competition to acquire 3Par is beginning to look like an auction. It started last week, with Dell striking a deal with 3Par to buy the company for $18 per share, or about $1.15bn total. HP countered the offer earlier this week, making a higher bid, which was in turn countered by Dell with an even bigger offer. 

3Par's storage platform is optimized for highly virtualized data centers and cloud computing applications. It enables utility-like provision of storage resources, using a clustered multi-tenant architecture.