Is another round of M&A drama about to ensue, courtesy of Compellent?

First, there was the epic bidding war over DataDomain during the summer of 2009. EMC claimed victory over NetApp in that episode. Then earlier this year, HP was victorious in snatching 3PAR from Dell’s waiting hands. Now, Compellent’s latest, record-setting revenue disclosure and rumors of a Dell acquisition has sent the data storage company’s stock price soaring.

Eden Prairie, Minnesota-based Compellent Technologies specializes in several storage technologies that improve energy efficiency in data centers, like thin provisioning, automatic tiering, and storage virtualization — technologies that can help staunch, and in some cases reverse, runaway growth of storage area networks (SAN) that’s become symptomatic of  an IT industry trying to keep pace with fast-growing web and cloud services providers. Not only can Compellent’s tech help data center operators reclaim valuable rack space, it can also help them avoid the energy costs that come from bulking up with data storage hardware.

Bottom line: It’s a great time to be a green storage startup. For Dell, bagging Compellent could help take the sting out of losing data deduplication firm 3PAR to HP. Unless history repeats and another cash-rich IT firm digs deep into its coffers…