Dell And EMC Expand Partnership

PC market leader Dell and storage market leader EMC on Wednesday unveiled a storage system for the small- and midsize-business market. Dell also expanded its high-end storage-management capabilities by offering products from EMC's Legato unit.

Both vendors will manufacture and market the Dell/EMC AX100 as an easy-to-deploy storage-networking system. A direct-attached version of the AX100 will be priced at around $5,000; a networked version will be priced at around $10,000. The system is designed to let customers store up to 3 terabytes of data and doesn't require any special storage-management skills, the two vendors say.

Dell also will begin offering high-end storage-management capabilities. The Legato NetWorker Dell Edition and Legato RepliStor Dell Edition will be installed on the AX100 as needed and serviced by Dell. NetWorker helps customers with data recovery tied to business-continuity efforts, and RepliStor helps customers who want to achieve the highest levels of business continuity with real-time mirroring of data. The Dell Edition of NetWorker is available now; RepliStor is expected by September.

Dell is able to offer a lot of high-end storage capabilities gained through its partnership with EMC. EMC is benefiting from Dell's large customer base in the small- and midsize-business market. But EMC is looking to expand its sales channel beyond Dell, one industry analyst says. Tony Prigmore, an analyst at the Enterprise Storage Group, expects EMC to begin courting additional resellers and systems integrators with the AX100. "EMC is ready to expand its channel presence," he says. "EMC wants to go after non-Dell partners in the channel for the SMB market."