Were the events of the last week an eBay auction, then the bidding war between HP and Dell has reached a swift and dramatic conclusion. One could even say that the former company sniped the auction at the last minuteto the tune of $2 billion for the acquisition of data storage provider 3PAR.

Were the events of the last week an eBay auction, then the bidding war between HP and Dell has reached a swift and dramatic conclusion. One could even say that the former company sniped the auction at the last minuteto the tune of $2 billion for the acquisition of data storage provider 3PAR.

HP's not-so-subtle efforts to pull the company away from a preliminary merger agreement with Della $1.15-billion arrangement announced August 16took three successive bids to reach an ultimate conclusion. The final acquisition cost of $2 billion, confirmed by 3PAR late Friday, represents a price of $30 per share of 3PAR stock. That's triple the closing price of the company's stock before Dell's initial offer was made public, and more than double after.

Although HP's board approved the offer on Friday, Dell still maintains the right to match HP's offer if it so choosesthat's based on the preliminary agreement between the Dell and 3PAR, which the latter intends to terminate after three business days from Friday.

"We are assessing and will act at some point in the best interests of investors and customers," said Dell spokesman David Frink.

According to Bloomberg, HP's valuation of 3PAR is the highest premium offered in such a bidding situation amongst more than 19 thousand different deals the company's tracked since 2001.

"For Dell, it's a lot of money," said Andy Hargreaves, an analyst at Pacific Crest Securities, in an interview with Bloomberg. "There's the potential for that to pay off, but you'd have to be hugely successful for that to break even and that's not a great bet."

However, it's not as if HPor Dell, if the company ends up making one final push for 3PARis acquiring blindly. According to PCMag.com's Samara Lynn, two of 3PAR's InServ storage arrays have been named the most exciting vendor products in use following a survey of Fortune 1,000 and mid-sized companies. As well, 3PAR itself scored second-place on TheInfoPro's "Most Exciting Vendor Products List" under the category of, "Most Exciting Vendor."

And while 3PAR's mid-to-high level storage arrays will boost the winning company's ability to deliver highly scalable solutions for public and private cloud computing, the fevered race to an acquisition by both can also be seen as an attempt to push a competitor out of the playing field.

"Clearly, when you go in with a bid that's a 33.3% premium [over a rival's bid] it's a competitive bid and not based on what the company is worth," said Mark Peters, an analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group, in an interview with Computerworld. "So it's going to end up with who blinks first. Which company wants to lose this bidding war less?"