3PAR sent out a statement Thursday morning saying that Dell went to $32 before the three-day clock ran out on it Wednesday at midnight, and HP countered Thursday morning with $33.

The 3PAR board recognized HP’s revised $33 bid as the “superior proposal” and said it told Dell it would go with HP unless Dell put more money on the table under the perpetual matching rights clause in their original deal.

Dell followed an hour later with a statement of its own saying it’s through. It’ll settle for the $72 million termination fee.

Dave Johnson, the ex-IBMer who’s now Dell’s senior vice-president of corporate strategy, said in the concession statement, “We took a measured approach throughout the process and have decided to end these discussions.”

It was obviously from the revised proposal that 3PAR said Dell put on the table when it went from $27 a share to $32 a share that 32 bucks was Dell’s last gasp.

3PAR said Dell wanted a termination fee of $92 million, $20 million more than the termination fee negotiated last week, as well as a multi-year reseller agreement that HP would have been saddled with that 3PAR said “contained fixed pricing and other terms that the 3PAR board of directors determined to be unacceptable.”

Dell later confirmed that 3PAR rejected its last offer and Bloomberg has talked to two people who told it that HP could probably gotten the joint for 30 bucks a share if it hadn’t acted precipitously.

It said it heard HP raised its bid to $33 “at 8 am New York time, 90 minutes before 3Par was due to publicly disclose its decision, believing that 3Par would have otherwise taken Dell’s offer.” It cost it another $188 million.

Anyway, to recap, Friday Dell matched HP’s bid of $27 and 3PAR accepted Dell offer. HP immediately went to $30 and last Friday night 3PAR’s board acknowledged HP’s money was a “superior offer” to Dell’s and told Dell it would terminate their merger agreement in three business days to go with HP unless Dell sweetened the deal. thirty-two dollars was its answer.

Wall Street thought Dell would up HP’s $33 bid because 3PAR stock started trading at $33.60 a share on the news of HP’s revised offer.

Two weeks ago Dell thought it had 3PAR in its pocket at $18 a share, roughly $1.15 billion, a few bucks more a share than it actually wanted to pay. HP upset the apple cart a week later with an unsolicited bid of $24 a share, starting last week’s run-up.

The money HP’s laying out is way more than ousted HP CEO Mark Hurd was reportedly willing to plunk down for the joint.

Hurd loyalists say he figured 3PAR wasn’t worth more than $750 million, roughly two-and-a-half times revenue – it hasn’t made any money in the three years it’s been public – and HP, in Hurd’s twilight hours at the firm, did refuse to improve on Dell’s original $1.15 billion offer.

Those same loyalists shake their collective head in disbelief that David Donatelli, the HP server and storage chief who egged HP on to victory in the unHurd-like auction, can make the $2.1 billion back anytime soon for all the fluttering of clouds. The normal business case HP works on is five years.

Supposedly this is another indication that without Hurd HP is on a slippery slope and about to careen downhill. Many in Hurd’s bunch of executives are reportedly updating their resumes and interviewing, aiming to collect their bonuses at the end of the year and bolt before their options get soggy from being underwater. If true, the HP board doesn’t see it coming. It’s hasn’t offered retention bonuses.

Oh, by the way, HP’s internal pool is betting that Hurd’s replacement will be an outsider on the theory that picking an internal candidate over the others who want the job will create an unpleasant situation. Donatelli wants the job, so does his boss Ann Livermore, who’s lost out twice before, printer chief Vyomesh Joshi and PC chief Todd Bradley.

The publicly traded Texas company accused 3PAR along with six other storage houses of infringing on its router and data storage patents in the Western District of Texas court in Austin, according to the Austin Business Journal.

3PAR’s InServe Storage Servers and Inform Operating System allegedly flout two Crossroads storage router patents that describe virtual storage on remote storage devices.

Whether Crossroads wins or not – and it has succeeded in wresting settlements before – it’s just jacked up 3PAR’s price for HP by whatever the legal bills run now that HP has outbid Dell.

Ironically, Crossroads, which has various widgetry to connect, protect, secure and restore business-critical data based on patented core routing messaging interface (RMI) technology, seems to have gotten a global reseller deal for the healthcare market with Dell Services in mid-August and says on its web site that it’s got an OEM partnership with HP as well as EMC and Quantum.

Crossroads Wednesday also posted its third-quarter results showing product revenues of $884,000, down from $941,000 in Q2, and revenue from IP licensing and royalties of $2.3 million, down from $4.1 million sequentially. It lost $1.5 million.

The other companies sued include American Megatrends, Rorke Data, D-Link Systems, Chelsio Communications, DataCore Software Corporation and iStor Networks.

Crossroads’ widgetry includes DBProtector (database security), FileMigrator Agent (migrating files from servers to network-attached storage), ReadVerify Appliance (monitoring tape media and the condition of disk drives) and ShareLoader (protecting data on desktop and laptop PCs and in remote offices).

XenClient, the mojo it introduced in May that Intel co-developed, will offer corporate accounts a bare metal hypervisor that’s supposed to make any species of laptop centrally manageable and secure.

Meanwhile, the same kind of widgetry in XenVault will be directed at the BYOC contractor crowd that’s now said to represent 20% of the US workforce.

Imagine their laptops then split into two personalities: a personal one where they can Twitter to their hearts content and a corporate one that has access to on-demand corporate apps and encrypted corporate data both of which the company can kill at will. Baring that eventuality, user changes will be backed up, making them immediately recoverable.

The new online/offline widgetry will be available immediately for download in a free, reportedly full-function XenDesktop Express with online support good for up to 10 users. By the last week of September it’ll be in the company’s XenDesktop Feature Pack 2 and included in the Enterprise and Platinum Editions of XenDesktop at no extra cost.

Citrix claims to have attracted three million XenDesktop seats so far this year, with over a hundred customers virtualizing upwards of a thousand seats. It says half the Fortune 100 are in production with the stuff.

Amazon’s grandmother looks safe for the moment, but Red Hat’s grandmother better start worrying because Red Hat’s sent its Apache Deltacloud API specification down to the Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF) to be prayed over by the DSMTF’s Cloud Management Work Group and resurrected as the arbiter of IaaS cloud portability and interoperability – and we all know how important that’s supposed to be even if early cloud users ignored history largely because, if they waited, they’d never have gotten cloud-borne.

Anyway, the Apache Deltacloud project is an open source implementation of a RESTful Web Service API abstracting common proprietary IaaS cloud management APIs like Amazon’s and Rackspace’s.

It was started by Red Hat last September and moved to the cover of the Apache Incubator earlier this year where – although it’s kinda dependent on Red Hat’s own Cloud Engine widgetry – it’s reportedly gotten “various stages of support and participation” from Cisco, Dell, Cisco, Dell, Gogrid, Goldman Sachs, HP, IBM, Ingres, Intel, Nimsoft, Opsource and Symantec.

Red Hat claims the move make Deltacloud “the only major cloud framework that isn’t tied in some way to a single company’s proprietary code, APIs or other intellectual property.” That doesn’t mean that it isn’t to Red Hat’s advantage, or that Red Hat’s code won’t run best on the thing. Heck, portability in itself is an evangelical advantage.

It plays to the futuristic vision of people moving on-demand – presumably painlessly and regardless of infrastructure or, God forbid, dependencies – between private and public clouds with an SLA, which is what the Hatter says the enterprise and the government want so long as everything can be managed from one place. Hope they’re not holding their breath

Deltacloud is key to Red Hat’s Cloud Foundations, announced in June, which is Red Hat’s everything-we-own-tossed-into-it cloud stack

Red Hat is striking early, probably prematurely, on the standards front ahead of other open source cloud projects like the newfangled OpenStack effort organized recently by Rackspace and still in development.

So far what makes it different, Red Hat says, is that it’s conceived as a Web Service and that means:

- The API can either be offered directly by the cloud provider or by individual users running their own server;
- Client libraries can be written in any number of computer languages, and are already available for popular ones;
- The core API logic resides on the API server, enabling consistent behavior across all client libraries; and
- Support for new clouds can be added to the API without changes to clients.

Drivers for Amazon EC2, GoGrid, OpenNebula, Rackspace, Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Management, RimuHosting, Terremark and vCloud are either written or in-process as is a Microsoft Azure cloud storage driver.

Of course if you can’t hoist apps up into the cloud the exercise is kinda useless so, aside from wanting to be the cloud’s interoperability bridge, Red Hat’s got an application infrastructure or platform-as-a-service (PaaS) play afoot too à la Azure, Google App Engine and VMforce that’s based around its JBoss Enterprise Middleware also part of its Cloud Foundations.

Red Hat claims to be the only company other than Microsoft capable of delivering a cloud stack consisting of an operating system, middleware and virtualization that’ll run a hybrid cloud environment.

It sees enterprises, cloud service providers, ISVs and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) providers using its JBoss PaaS widgetry to take existing assets and develop new applications and deploy them to a range of public and private clouds, its interoperability vision again.

The company said Wednesday that its next-generation PaaS solution would simplify the development of simple new web applications as well as complex transactional enterprise applications and integrate them into an enterprise.

To advance the scheme it’ll have a reference architecture so existing apps can be re-purposed in the cloud.

The PaaS plan involves Red Hat’s prospective cloud engine for application lifecycle management and promises to let developers use their favorite frameworks and languages, stuff like Java EE, POJO, Spring, Seam, Struts, GWT, Groovy and Ruby. JBoss Developer Studio is supposed to have a bunch of Eclipse plug-ins to deploy applications into a JBoss platform instance in a cloud.

Red Hat expects JBoss cloud images to be available through a variety of public and private clouds including Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization, Amazon EC2 and Windows Hyper-V as well as others through its cloud engine.

Let’s remember too that VMware stole a lot of JBoss’ thunder with its acquisition of SpringSource. It converted the Spring Framework into its own cloudified PaaS solution for Java applications.

By the way, Dreamworks (Shrek) Animation is using Red Hat Cloud Foundations to build a “one of the world’s largest” private clouds for future films.

Start-up Lyric Semiconductor Inc. says it’ll be a fifth non-digital architecture that it’s inventing called the GP5.

The GP5 is a chip, well, maybe more of a co-processor, meant to embody some magic called probability processing that’s supposed to change today’s processing performance and power consumption by serious orders-of-magnitude. It could reduce the power and space currently demanded by data centers by 10x.

The GP5 is supposed to make an educated guess about exactly what you want when you’re searching the web and calculate the odds of you paying for it with a bogus credit card.

It’s supposed to be a God send for spam filtering, genome sequencing, financial modeling and separating the noise from the real communications traffic among would be terrorists, which is why DARPA, the Defense Advanced Projects Research Agency, and its ilk put $18 million into Lyric, an MIT spin-out that just surfaced this week.

Lyric says its approach fits any application that involves simultaneously considering many possible alternatives and deciding the best guess for the answer, and those apps are growing in number. Google, needless to say, has hired all the probability experts it can find.

Modern algorithms and the biggest of modern computers are being used to make educated guesses but conventional digital processors aren’t very good at it. They’re inefficient and need huge amounts of processing overhead that cost a lot of space, power and money to do it.

Lyric promises to improve on old-style digital computing with performance gains of 1,000x better than the current x86 widgetry from Intel and AMD. In other words, deliver the processing power of 1,000 servers in a single chip.

Between MIT and the four-year-old Lyric, the new way of calculating has been more than 10 years in the making, but the GP5 doesn’t exist yet – at least not in any commercial form. Lyric does hint about “transitioning the technology into some cool James Bond-type applications” for the government the past year but it doesn’t expect to be sampling a commercial dingus until 2013.

The GP5 will run code written in Lyric’s own probability programming language called PSBL, short for Probability Synthesis to Bayesian Logic, an expressive computer programming language for working with probability-based computations. PSBL will be released in the fourth quarter of this year so Lyric and the GP5 can start gathering an ecosystem.

Meanwhile, as a revenue-generating test bed, the first commercial application of Lyric’s probability processing will be Error Correction for flash memory where currently one in every thousand bits stored in a flash memory comes out wrong when the memory is read and where, with the next, denser generation of flash, a scarier one bit in every hundred will be wrong.

Lyric means to remedy this situation, cut errors to 1 bit in every 1,000 trillion and at the same time cut flash’s die size by 30x and improve its power consumption by 12x at a higher throughput than current digital solutions. It could save everybody involved billions of dollars. Widget makers, for one, will be able to offer more storage at lower costs.

It’s got a proof-of-concept processing circuit – fabbed by Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Corporation – that it launched at the Flash Memory Summit this week. The Error Correction technology is available for license along with the support services that Lyric thinks can turn into silicon for any licensee in 12 months. The company expects to close three deals this quarter, presumably with flash memory makers.

Lyric’s magic rests on the development of a new kind of logic gate circuit that uses transistors like dimmer switches rather than like classic on/off switches. These circuits can accept inputs and calculate outputs that are between 0 and 1, directly representing probabilities or levels of certainty. A modern digital processor steps through these operations serially. Lyric’s processors are meant to run probability computations in parallel.

Lyric says it can do with a mere handful of transistors what conventionally takes 500 transistors.

Redesigning processing circuits from the ground up to process probabilities natively – from the gate circuits to the processor architecture to the programming language – is how Lyric is supposed to cut down the thousand conventional processors that many applications need to just one Lyric processor and fetch its 1,000x savings in cost, power and size.

Lyric was started by CEO Ben Vigoda, who thought the widgetry up, and VP of product development David Reynolds and is backed by over $20 million from DARPA and other agencies as well as investments from chairman of the board Ray Stata, founder of Analog Devices and lead partner of Stata Venture Partners.

Lyric expects to hit profitability without more investment; the GP5′s further development will evidently be funded by revenues. The start-up holds 50 fundamental patent filings in probability processing and currently employs 30 people.

It is Intel’s biggest acquisition ever by a factor of three.

CEO Paul Otellini said during a conference call Thursday morning that the purchase “transitions Intel from a PC company to a computing company.”

Intel explained that that the acquisition, part of its mobile wireless strategy, will let it combine security software and hardware as billions of still relatively innocent, unprotected devices – and the server and cloud networks that manage them – go online. It also differentiates Intel from its competition.

The move is supposed to put security “on a par with energy-efficient performance and connectivity” as a pillar of its business. Intel’s vision includes TVs, cars, medical devices and ATM machines and it noted that cyber threats are spiraling out of control.

So a “fundamentally new approach” is needed and it promised that hardware-enhanced security would lead to breakthroughs in countering the increasingly sophisticated threats.

The move was immediately seen as a reach for inorganic growth with better margins in a business that’s less bumpy than chips. For instance, PC order trends have sharply deteriorated lately. McAfee does close to $2 billion a year, has seen 20% growth recently and fetched close to an 80% gross margin last year. It only makes about $200 million however.

The deal will cost Intel $48 a share in cash. Net of McAfee’s cash, it will cost Intel about $6.8 billion.

Intel will run McAfee as an independent subsidiary reporting to Intel’s Software and Services Group under Renée James.

The security house has 6,100 people. Intel says it will keep most of them including management. Aside from its antivirus widgetry, McAfee’s wares include end-point and networking products and services and an expanding line of gear targeting mobile devices such as smartphones, a market that’s been eluding Intel.

McAfee claims 200 million users.

McAfee has been frequently cited as acquisition bait but never in association with Intel. Intel said that a quiet partnership with McAfee over the last 18 months persuaded it to make the move and then it found a lot of other projects needed to be secured.

Otellini explained that it’s not a matter of bungling but of integration. He said Intel would still work with other security vendors.

The first combined McAfee-Intel products are due in the first part of 2011. James indicated they would involve Intel’s existing Core chips with Atom to follow. Deeper integration will take a while.

Intel means to keep the McAfee brand and to have it continue to support multiple platforms.

The acquisition is expected to dilute Intel’s GAAP earnings slightly the first year and be flat the second year.

The acquisition, already approved by both boards, will hopefully close by December.

Last year Intel bought the embedded OS Wind River.

It earned a record 43 cents a share, or 33 cents net, up 79%, on sales worth a record $10.8 billion, up 27% year-over-year, which seemed to say spending is coming back. Only trouble was the numbers didn’t match or better yet exceed Wall Street’s rosier forecasts of 42 cents on $10.88 billion. And its margin slipped a point sequentially to 64% in part because of supply shortages.

Cisco said it ran into a disconcerting “mixed signal pattern that we haven’t seen before.”

Orders dropped for maybe four weeks between late June and early July then the pattern confusingly reversed itself. Only you don’t know whether Cisco influenced that turnabout. Its overall product orders were up 23% in the quarter.

Not only did Cisco fail to manage expectations but CEO John Chambers, who has become something of a Wall Street early warning system, made seemingly contradictory statements Wednesday and Thursday about seeing “unusual uncertainty” surrounding spending and jobs, with his customers forecasting only 2% growth in the second half, but Cisco squeezing 12%-18% growth out of that this quarter. And everyone knows John’s a glass half-full kinda guy.

Well, Cisco dropped an initial 9.4% after hours Wednesday only to worsen Thursday to 9.99% and take practically the whole tech sector down with it during a week when the bears came out again in earnest.

After multiple repetitions of the same story it’s still unclear what Chambers thinks will really happen with IT spending going forward other than that the recovery looks like it’s going to be very slow, if not imperceptible, like the Federal Reserve said Tuesday.

Still he said on the basis of things Cisco can “control or influence” it’ll do a conservative $10.64 billion to $10.83 billion this quarter, up 18%-20%. Unfortunately Wall Street wanted projections of $10.95 billion.

Chambers still maintains the possibility of a double dip is “relatively low.” (From your mouth to God’s ear, Johnny boy.)

As an indication of Cisco’s confidence, Chambers said the company would hire another 3,000 people, mostly in the US, the next couple of quarters. It hired 2,000 last quarter. Some observers consider the move risky.

There was a lot of downgrading going on Thursday.

Gartner Tuesday pulled in its second-half worldwide spending projections from up 4.1% in April to up only 2.9%.