Tech companies Dell and EMC announced that they have extended their partnership through 2013, and EMC will allow Dell to sell its Celerra NX4 storage system. This partnership was first signed in October 2001, as the duo focused on storage customers. The alliance mostly focuses on the midmarket, an area where Dell is strong. EMC used to focus on large storage deployments. By now, Dell and EMC have deployed 60,000 storage systems and the current plans for EMC's Celerra NX4, which was launched in August, call for it to be added to Dell's storage lineup in early 2009. Dell's EMC portfolio includes networked storage systems designed to support solid state drives, data warehousing gear and other mid-range systems.

EMC has long been targeting the small and medium-size business market through partnerships, teaming up with Intel in 2006 to co-develop storage technology. The partnership let EMC assist Intel with identifying small to midsize businesses storage needs and building out its storage portfolio, while Intel helped EMC to construct more efficient storage subsystems.

In Dell's fiscal third quarter, the company said that server storage and services now represents half of its gross profit, up from 44 percent at the beginning of the fiscal year. However, Dell bought storage hardware maker EqualLogic earlier this year, which makes products that compete directly against EMC's equipment. Sales of Dell/EMC gear have been on the decline, falling 26 percent year-to-year in the third quarter of 2008. Anyway, it seems that did not stop them from extending their alliance for five more years.