Wegang.com

Dell is set to acquire storage specialist 3Par for about $1.15 billion to beef up its enterprise cloud offerings, the tech giant announced Monday.

3Par, founded in 1999, offers highly virtualized storage arrays designed to help businesses treat storage as a utility, meaning they use–and pay for–capacity only as they need it, Dell said. 3Par’s offerings include data management features such as dynamic tiering and thin provisioning for multitenant cloud-computing environments.

With the addition of 3Par’s capabilities, Dell said it aims to help customers reduce overall data management costs by 50 percent.

Dell plans to acquire all of 3Par’s outstanding common stock for $18 per share in cash and expects to close the acquisition by year’s end. The boards of directors of both Dell and 3Par have approved the terms of the deal.

When the acquisition is complete, Fremont, Calif.-based 3Par will join Dell’s storage portfolio, which already includes PowerVault, EqualLogic, and Dell/EMC offerings. Dell said it plans to maintain and invest in additional engineering and sales capability for 3Par.