Dell, Inc., announced Tuesday that it has closed on the acquisition of Eden Prairie-based Compellent Technologies, Inc., a provider of data storage solutions.

The Round Rock, Texas-based computer giant paid $27.75 per share for Compellent, which brings the value of the deal to about $940 million. The two companies came to a definitive agreement on the terms of the purchase in December.

The Compellent acquisition is Dell's latest strategic investment to bolster its enterprise storage lineup. Dell sought to purchase Compellent after it lost a bidding war with Hewlett-Packard (HP) for California-based 3Par, which offers technology similar to Compellent's. HP paid $2.35 billion for 3Par.

All of Compellent's 560 employees-including about 400 in the Twin Cities-were offered positions with Dell, said Compellent spokesperson Liem Nguyen. Phil Soran, the former CEO and co-founder of Compellent, is now president of Dell Compellent.

Dell plans to maintain Compellent's existing operations in Eden Prairie, and the merged company's focus will be on growing and expanding Dell's enterprise storage portfolio, Nguyen said.

“Compellent and Dell share the vision of helping enterprise and cloud customers optimize their storage investments,” Soran said in a press release. “Compellent's Fluid Data architecture helps deliver the vision by allowing customers to keep the right data on the right storage at the right costs. Our team is committed to helping Dell transform the data center with open, capable, and affordable solutions that allow customers to do more with their IT dollars.”

Compellent, founded in 2002, provides data management features for enterprise and cloud-computing environments within a 35-country sales network. It was among Minnesota's 70-largest public companies based on revenue, which totaled $125.3 million in 2009-up 38 percent from 2008.