Over the past two years, EMC has announced a number of partnerships and products that slipped its toe into the door of the server market. On Tuesday, the company with Lenovo under which the two will build and sell servers, and, of course, storage, beginning with the Chinese market.

Lenovo and EMC have formed a server technology development program that will accelerate and extend Lenovo's capabilities in the x86 industry-standard server segment, according to EMC. "These servers will be brought to market by Lenovo and embedded into selected EMC storage systems over time," the company said.

Lenovo is on its way to becoming the world's top PC vendor, according to IDC. EMC has long been the world's largest external storage vendor.

EMC's partnership with Lenovo creates a development and reseller relationship: Lenovo will hawk EMC's networked storage products to its customers, first in China then in other global markets.

"For anybody who has not felt or sensed that EMC was expanding their focus and role beyond storage to embracing data and information management from servers out to the desktop..., this should get their attention, and, for some perhaps, instill fear of what these two companies are doing," said Greg Schulz, senior advisor at market research firm StorageIO Group.