Dell’s expanded OEM relationship with Brocade that positions Dell to compete against Cisco’s Unified Computing initiative will enable Dell’s channel partner resellers to sell the solutions to their end customers.

A Dell spokeswoman confirmed the channel partner play that follows the OEM deals with Brocade, Scalent and VMware, announced at the VMworld event in San Francisco.

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The expanded Brocade relationship calls for the development of “a dynamic infrastructure and optimization solution enabled by virtualization to allow customers to deploy and manage an efficient data center.”

Further, the Dell/Brocade expanded relationship calls for integrated tool sets to manage application delivery and deployment as business services on compute, network and storage infrastructure, according to a statement from Dell. The companies expect the solutions to provide capital and operational expense savings through broader server and storage deployment.

Dell is the most recent technology vendor to strike such a deal with Brocade, following IBM, Hewlett-Packard and NetApp, all looking to fortify their competitive position against Cisco's Unified Computing initiative. Other vendors likely to strike OEM deals with Brocade include EMC and Hitachi.

Dell also says it is simplifying the deployment and management of virtual environments by delivering an OEM version of Scalent’s V/OE, an open infrastructure management system.

And Dell says it is expanding its client/server computing and virtualization technologies that it calls Dell’s Flexible Computing Strategy through a deeper relationship with VMware. Dell will incorporate VMware VIEW into its Virtual Remote Desktop solution, which Dell says will enable IT managers to run virtual desktops in the data center while giving end users a view of all their applications and data in their familiar environment on any device at any location.