Dell and EMC announced the renewal of their partnership last week as EMC held its North American Analyst Summit in Hopkinton, Mass., which I attended. The deal has been good for both the Round Rock, Texas-based computer giant and for its storage counterpart in Hopkinton. Since the companies inked their original deal in 2001, Dell has become EMC's largest reseller of storage systems.

The new deal extends until 2013 – another five years – and signals a successful sales relationship which some industry pundits said would not last after Dell acquired iSCSI SAN vendor EqualLogic in November 2007. To date, the partnership has brought in 60,000 Dell/EMC installations.

As part of the renewed deal, Dell will add EMC’s Celerra NX4 network-attached storage systems and gateways to its arsenal. The NX4 is a multiprotocol storage system that can attach to the network either via iSCSI or Gigabit Ethernet, allowing it to act as a block-level storage device or as NAS.

The NX4 was introduced by EMC in August this year. It includes Serial Attached SCSI and Serial ATA drives and works with VMware environments involving Microsoft SQL Server and Exchange. NX4 systems from Dell are expected to be available in early 2009.

Not only has EMC benefited from the relationship, but Dell has too. Dell customers can pair their PowerEdge server purchases with storage from Dell/EMC. In its third quarter financial filing, Dell reported that server storage and services accounts for half its gross profit, an increase of 44% since the first of the year.

Deni Connor is principal analyst for Storage Strategies NOW and host of both the Masters of Storage and Masters of Servers Solution Centers.