Dell ditches EMC

PC manufacturer, Dell has put an end to its reseller deal with EMC, in a sign of confidence in its own storage portfolio, Wired reports.

After acquiring multiple storage vendors over the last few years, including EqualLogic in 2007 and Compellent earlier this year, Dell now has its own stable of storage hardware.

Channel Register says this means Dell will not sell Dell-branded EMC OEM and resold EMC CLARiiON, Celerra, Data Domain and VNX products.

However, Dell will support existing customers with these products. It will resell capacity upgrades (drives and enclosures) and software titles for as long as EMC also sells these upgrades, possibly through 2016.

Dell says it has spent more than $2 billion building up its storage portfolio, and it will spend another $1 billion this financial year to gain technology in the data centre, mobile and cloud environments.

It says its own storage properties provide almost 80% of its storage revenues and 90% of its profits in the second quarter of this year.

The end of the relationship has been on the cards for a while, ZDNet explains.

Over the past few years, Dell has acquired a range of mid-level storage companies, and it launched a bidding war for thin-provisioning storage specialist, 3Par, which it eventually lost to HP.

With EMC gone, Dell now resells CommVault Simpana and Symantec Backup Exec software within its PowerVault DL backup and recovery appliance. It also resells VMware's Site Recovery Manager software.