Dell, EMC Extend Partnership into 2013

PC maker Dell and EMC, an information infrastructure company, announced Dec. 9 a partnership extension through 2013 that will also include Dell adding a new EMC storage system to its product portfolio.

Dell and EMC will add the EMC Celerra NX4 storage system to the portfolio of Dell-EMC networked storage systems, the companies announced Dec. 9. Dell and EMC first teamed up in October 2001 to better server customers at the midmarket level, where Dell has a strong foothold. The release stated that the success of the partnership has been demonstrated by the more than 60,000 deployed solutions since the partnership began.  

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"By broadening and extending our deep alliance, Dell and EMC are able to deliver to customers fully integrated data center solutions as the pre-eminent storage partners to customers worldwide," Dell Chairman and CEO Michael Dell said in a statement. “Today's economic realities place an emphasis on efficient solutions that consolidate and virtualize—which through our long-standing partnership we are well-positioned to deliver."

The lineup of Dell-EMC CX4 networked storage systems introduced in August is designed to incorporate the latest technologies in drives, connectivity, processing power, thin provisioning and security. It is the first midrange storage array in the market to support state-of-the-art SSDs (solid-state disks). Introduced by EMC in August of this year, the EMC Celerra NX4, a unified storage solution that consolidates NAS (network-attached storage), iSCSI and Fibre Channel technologies on one platform, is expected to join the Dell storage portfolio in early 2009.

"This relationship had its genesis during a challenging time in the economy and a desire by both companies to provide cost-effective solutions to customers who still had to manage ever increasing amounts of information,” EMC President and CEO Joe Tucci said in a statement. “The same is true today, and while Dell and EMC are both very different than they were in 2001, we are committed to our mutual customers and to delivering industry-leading technologies that can provide them maximum return on their investment."

EMC has long been targeting the small and midsize business market through partnerships, notably teaming up with Intel in 2006 to co-develop storage technology. The partnership let EMC assist Intel with identifying SMBs' storage needs and building out its storage portfolio, while Intel helped EMC to construct more efficient storage subsystems capable of being married closer to hardware chip and server environments.

Although rumors swirled in 2007 that EMC was getting ready to shut down its Insignia line of products aimed at SMBs, EMC said the restructuring of the group is part of an ongoing "streamlining" of the company as a whole and that there are no plans to discontinue any products. As of 2007, the Velocity SMB partner program had more than 1,300 partners worldwide.

Earlier this year, EMC introduced the CLARiiON AX4 networked storage system, a flexible, scalable SAN (storage area network) system for SMBs. The system can be deployed, expanded and reconfigured in VMware Infrastructure and traditional IT environments with no application downtime.