About month and a half ago, buzz began to surround Eden Prairie, Minnesota-based Compellent Technologies based on reports that Dell was interested in acquiring the storage startup. Rumor became reality today when it was revealed that Dell is acquiring Compellent for $960 million.  The firm specializes in storage technologies that improve energy efficiency in data centers, including thin provisioning, automatic tiering, and storage virtualization.

In a press statement, Brad Anderson, senior vice president of Dell’s Enterprise Product Group said, “Compellent is a natural complement to Dell’s expanding enterprise storage portfolio. The Compellent storage platform will enable Dell to provide customers additional mid- and high-end network storage solutions that simplify and reduce the cost of data management.”

More importantly, the deal marks a victory for Dell, particularly as competition grows for tech like Compellent’s that has — pardon the pun — a compelling value proposition for businesses that are increasingly finding themselves with ballooning storage infrastructures and energy costs to match. Earlier this year HP outbid Dell for 3PAR, which specializes in cloud storage, storage virtualization and thin provisioning. Last year, EMC beat out NetApp for DataDomain in a spectacular bidding war. And as 2010 comes to a close, the pool of potential acquisition targets for storage innovators is drying up, placing the spotlight on CommVault, Pillar Data Systems and DataDirect Networks.

Now, who’s next?