Dell stops reselling EMC gear

Dell has put an end to its reseller deal with hardware maker EMC, in a sign of confidence in its own storage portfolio.

As a result of the move, announced on Tuesday, Dell will no longer sell Clariion, Celerra, Data Domain and VNX storage equipment from EMC. Instead, Dell will now concentrate on pushing its own products to customers. However, it will continue to support existing EMC products through to 2016, Dell said.

It comes after Dell's inaugural major conference last week, at which it stressed its desire to move up the stack and become a supplier of integrated systems made of servers, storage and networking, all provided by the Round Rock, Texas-based company.

"Over the past three-and-a-half years, Dell has invested more than $2bn [£1.27bn] to expand its own family of storage products built for the virtualised, cloud-based datacentres of today and tomorrow," it said in a statement. "Dell's Compellent, EqualLogic [and] PowerVault storage offerings represent a new way for customers to more intelligently store and manage information."

Dell's Compellent range competes directly with EMC's Clariion products, and the company has recently moved to strengthen products that rival Data Domain, introducing its Dell DX6000G Storage Compression Node at Dell World.

The end of the relationship has been on the cards for a while: 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.