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Dell's Storage Sneaks Up: Page 2 of 4

"We’re extending our partner direct program for small and medium businesses and expanding our offerings into mid-sized businesses," he said, adding that he expects iSCSI to reach about 25 percent of all enterprise disk shipments by 2011.

Earlier this month, the vendor threw down $1.4 billion to acquire iSCSI SAN specialist EqualLogic, signaling Dell's intentions to crack the storage market.

"EqualLogic is an extension of the fact that we’re already in the storage business," said Dell's CFO Donald Carty, in response to a question from an analyst during last night's call. "You’d expect us to do well in growing our footprint in the storage business and growing it pretty quickly here."

Dell is keen to strengthen its portfolio against rival vendors such as IBM and HP, and the SMB market is seen by many vendors as a relatively untapped arena for selling storage products and services.

The acquisition was seen by analysts as a shrewd move to jump-start Dell's storage business, as iSCSI is increasingly being touted as an alternative to Fibre Channel, particularly amongst SMBs.