Every day, it seems there’s a tech company being sold or rumored to be on the block. With so many deals, I thought I should reach out to someone with deep background in the sector.

Ron Pillar joined i-bank Sagent Advisors on Wednesday as an MD in the tech group. Before Sagent, Pillar was at Ladenburg Thalmann where he was vice chairman and co-head of investment banking.

Prior to that, he spent nine years at J.P. Morgan where he was head of technology investment banking. It was at J.P. Morgan that Pillar headed up the advisory team in the 2006 merger of Lucent Technologies and Alcatel of France. He also directed the $700 million IPO of Neustar as well as the $8 billion spin-off of Teradata from NCR Corp.

Fresh off of its sale of storage provider 3PAR to Hewlett-Packard, Menlo Ventures is backing Coraid Inc., a cloud-based storage solutions provider.

The Redwood City, Calif.-based company announced this morning that it has raised a $25 million Series B investment led by Menlo Ventures with participation from Allegis Capital and Azure Capital Partners. Coraid, which develops Ethernet-based storage products, previously raised a $10 million Series A round from Azure and Allegis in late 2009.

As part of the deal, John Jarve, managing director of Menlo Ventures, has joined the board of Coraid, which already includes Lara Druyan, a GP with Allegis, and Paul Weinstein, a GP with Azure.

Menlo was interested in taking part in Coraid’s Series A round, but it was still an investor in 3PAR at the time and “we tend not to back companies that are competitive to others in our portfolio,” Jarve says.

Kevin Fong, the former chairman of data storage company 3PAR Inc., likes to talk about poker, often uses poker analogies and says he studies the card game. He even has a home in Las Vegas. But you won’t find him spending time in casinos, playing Texas Hold ‘em and flipping chips. He says he doesn’t [...]

The Mayfield Fund, fresh off of the $2.4 billion sale of storage company 3PAR, in which it was an original investor (as we previously reported), plans to announce on Tuesday that it has led the $13 million Series B round in StorSimple. It was a competitive round, says Ursheet Parikh, co-founder and CEO of  StorSimple, [...]

Menlo Ventures is looking to raise $600 million to $800 million for its next fund, Bloomberg News said.

If it reaches $800 million, the Menlo fund would be the biggest raised in the U.S. this year. It would surpass Battery Ventures and Institutional Venture Partners, which each raised $750 million. But it would be smaller than Menlo’s last fund which raised $1.2 billion in 2005, Bloomberg said.

Four acquisitions of virtual software and cloud-based companies this week have fueled speculation that there will be more to come. At the VMworld conference this week, the buzz has mostly been about the bidding war over 3Par, which Hewlett-Packard won today with its $2.4 billion offer. (As we previously reported, a few VC firms stand [...]

It’s said that good things come to those who wait. Such will no doubt be the case for the three venture firms that are at least 5% shareholders in 3PAR Inc. The Mountain View, Calif.-based storage vendor is at the center of a bidding war between Hewlett-Packard and Dell. The latest offer of $30 a [...]

3Par must feel like the wall flower who gets crowned prom queen and gets to pick her king. Who knew a data storage company could be so wanted?

The bidding war for 3Par got even crazier today with HP sweetening its offer to $30 a share. This came after Dell boosted its own proposal to $27 a share just this morning.

No matter who wins the bidding war, three venture firms will get a nice, big payday. Mayfield Fund owns 9.9% of 3Par, Menlo Ventures has 15% and Worldview Technology Partners holds 13.4%. FMR LLC, or Fidelity Investments, has 12.2%, according to regulatory filings.

At $30 a share, Mayfield could reap $186 million (6.2 million shares), while Menlo Ventures (9.4 million shares) could receive $282 million, Worldview Technology (8.4 million) could get $252 million and Fidelity (7.6 million) could receive $228 million.