The maker of very expensive printer ink HP has trumped its rival Dell by offering $1.6bn to buy data storage firm 3PAR.

Dell only rustled up $1.2bn last week. Dell, HP and IBM are both looking at methods of making a bob or two out of IT services. It seems that everyone is buying everyone else at the moment. Last week Intel bought McAfee for $7.8bn although no one is really sure why.

The HP and Dell bidding war shows how keen the three are to get into cloud computing. It is unlikely that Dell would be able to match HP's offer so it will  have to find another company which can offer it something similar. Either way we do not expect this current buying up of storeage companies to end too soon.