Dell To Add EMC Unified Storage System

Dell on Tuesday said early next year it will begin selling EMC's Celerra NX4 unified storage system.

In addition, Dell and EMC said they have agreed to extend their partnership through 2013. Dell has been selling EMC products since 2001.

The multiprotocol NX4 can be used for network-attached or iSCSI storage, or within a storage area network. The system scales up to 60 drives and can support one or two blade servers.

EMC markets the NX4 as an easy system to set up, manage, and monitor, claiming the system can "go from power-up to production in 15 minutes." The product supports SAS and SATA hard drives and is certified for operating within VMware-based virtualization environments and as storage for Microsoft's Exchange e-mail server and SQL Server database.

EMC products available with NX4 include the Celerra Filemover API, which automates file movement to clients and applications. Other software includes Celerra Manager for configuring, administering, and monitoring the Internet Protocol storage environment and Celerra Replicator for creating network-attached storage file system copies.

EMC introduced the NX4 in August, the same month the company said it would sell its CX4 NAS system through Dell. The CX4 is a midrange storage array that supports solid-state drives.

In September, Dell and EMC released a package of hardware and software pre-configured to run an Oracle data warehouse. The combined product is meant to reduce the complexity of deploying the data store for business intelligence.

Despite Dell's partnership with EMC, the company's backup portfolio remains a bit thin at the high end, lacking a virtual tape library and deduplication.

The company last month said it would enter the deduplicating target market with future products based on Quantum's deduplication software that would support whole lines of disk storage devices. Those products include Dell/EMC Clariions and Dell/EqualLogic arrays.