Storage Vendor 3PAR Goes Public

High-end and midrange data storage provider 3PAR went public Nov. 16, announcing that its initial public offering of 7.5 million shares of common stock on the New York Stock Exchange had been priced at $14 per share.

3PARs common stock will be listed under the trading symbol "PAR," a company spokesperson said. All 7.5 million shares are being offered exclusively by 3PAR. Net proceeds to the company are expected to be about $95 million, the spokesperson said.

3PAR has also granted the underwriters a 30-day option to purchase up to another 1.1-plus million shares from 3PAR at the IPO price, less the underwriting discount.

Analysts have considered 3PAR a prime acquisition target for more than a year by either Hewlett-Packard or IBM. The company has been a key innovator. In 2003, 3PAR brought the concepts of utility storage and thin provisioning to the industry.

Utility storage hardware aims to provide a massively scalable, high-end tiered storage array for reliable block—Fibre Channel and iSCSI—data services. The companys InServ array is designed for open systems storage consolidation, integrated data lifecycle management and performance-intensive applications, the spokesperson said.

Thin provisioning software in the storage server—now a hot item in the data storage sector—helps IT managers allocate storage to specific applications. 3PAR was the first storage vendor to offer this form of utility storage.

3PAR and Network Appliance on June 5 announced a partnership to build a storage package that unites 3PARs InServ storage server with NetApps V-Series systems.

3PAR also has been a leader in the green data center movement. In January, the company took the idea of making data centers more energy efficient a step further by announcing that for every terabyte of its thin provisioning storage capacity it sold in 2007, it would buy the equivalent cost in so-called "carbon credits" to help offset the greenhouse gas emissions of the disk drives required to deliver that capacity.

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