EMC employees have some major concerns ahead of the company's impending acquisition by Dell, including whether they'll have to reapply for their jobs, whether their pay will remain the same, and how they should refer to themselves.

After the sale, what becomes of the rest of Dell's security portfolio, and its addition of RSA as part of its pending acquisition of EMC?

HPE, EMC and Pure Storage are all in competition to form partnerships with the best solution providers in the field. Channel chiefs talk about what their respective companies are doing to help partners evolve.

In Part Two of a series, channel chiefs at five of the top storage vendors admit that the world does not revolve around them, and said solution providers looking to offer complete solutions need to explore a variety of partnerships and technologies.

Cook said it's likely that the team of top executives leading the integration of the two IT industry powerhouses have executives in mind for channel leadership positions, but neither she nor her EMC counterpart, Gregg Ambulos, have been briefed.

Cisco, which tried and failed in its earlier attempt to bring all-flash storage to its Cisco UCS server platform by acquiring Whiptail, has invested in an Israel-based startup focusing on software-defined, all-flash storage solutions.

The Seattle-based company, which allows files to be searched and classified according to the contents of data, has now reached $100 million in funding, its CEO says.

In other top stories from this week, EMC sets a date on its shareholder vote regarding its acquisition by Dell. Also, HPE slams the Dell-EMC merger.

As speculation swirls about the potential sale of F5 Networks, channel partners said they worry that an acquisition could hurt their wallets.

Formation Data Systems added the capability to its FormationOne Dynamic Storage Platform software-defined storage application as a way to help customers with multiple commodity servers recover capacity lost to virtual machine sprawl.

HPE Senior Vice President and General Manager Manish Goel described Dell-EMC as "two declining" companies struggling to make it in the full-stack converged infrastructure era.

The rejiggered rebate program will offer a 1- to 2-percent rebate bump to emphasize the stars of EMC's new-school portfolio.

Executives from channel cloud divisions within vendors offer advice on how to transition to cloud offerings and thrive.

The Unity name has been used with storage long before EMC and Nexsan started arguing about it.

Dell's new SCOS 7 promises lower flash and hybrid storage cost, increased capacity efficiency and easy movement of data volumes around the data center.

Jeremy Burton talks about the hits and misses at EMC since he took over the product portfolio, hints at a bigger role for VCE as his company becomes part of the future Dell Technologies, and dismisses competition with NetApp and Lenovo.

While Nexsan earlier this year applied for trademark protection for the Unity brand in the storage field and released a storage solution with the brand, EMC is saying it has priority based on customer presentations over a year ago.

The networking giant has to up the storage ante as the new Dell-EMC comes to play and other competitors make their moves, partners say.

Lenovo executives are essentially arguing the company is better off without EMC as it develops a data center strategy that relies heavily on partnering with a variety of vendors on all-flash, software-defined and hyper-converged systems without the weight of a large legacy hardware business on its shoulders.

Lenovo executives are essentially arguing the company is better off without EMC as it develops a data center strategy that relies heavily on partnering with a variety of vendors on all-flash, software-defined and hyper-converged systems without the weight of a large legacy hardware business on its shoulders.