Storage solutions provider EMC announced a partnership with storage software maker BMC Software on Wednesday. The two will work closely to bring end-to-end storage management solutions to enterprise customers, the companies said.

Under the deal, EMC has acquired the rights to BMC’s PATROL Storage Manager software, while BMC takes on a reseller role distributing EMC’s ControlCenter suite of storage resource management offerings.

BMC’s PATROL Storage Manager consolidates application, logical and physical storage-related data about SAN, NAS, direct-attached and mainframe storage environments. The Storage Manager also offers information about specific applications and associates that data with related storage assets in the environment, the company said. The EMC ControlCenter automates the management of multi-vendor networked storage environments and enables customers to view the elements of their IT infrastructure including both hardware and software.

According to an EMC spokesperson, over the course of the next two years, EMC will continue support for PATROL and will offer existing PATROL customers the ability to migrate to EMC’s ControlCenter solution. EMC said it plans to integrate PATROL with the ControlCenter solution after January 2005.

In addition to the software integration and reseller arrangements, the companies have also agreed that BMC will offer its PATROL users the equivalent EMC ControlCenter licenses to enable a smooth migration from the PATROL software.