Back at Dell World 2011, a Forbes correspondent wrote about what he thought might be Michael Dell’s grand plan for his company. He made a comparison between the electronics giant’s CEO and Steve Jobs to emphasis his point, using the latter as an example of a leader who’d managed to craft a successful long-term plan for his company.

By the looks of it today, Dell’s vision involves a lot of storage.

For one, the company will be hosting its next conference and first Dell Storage Forum in Europe on 9 – 12 Jan. The upcoming London gathering is a strong indicator of the electronics maker’s expansion on the continent, where it has already managed to build up a sizable customer base that it’s clearly looking to expand.

“I often get asked which part of the Dell business I like the most. I have four kids and I love them all equally, but I do love storage – in fact Dell started as a storage company,” Dell trumpeted of his love for all things data storage at his company’s first ever Dell Storage Forum in Orlando.

Another sign was the announcement Dell will not be renewing a 10 year old partnership with EMC to resell the latter’s storage offerings.  And there were a handful of product updates as well throughout the last months of 2011 which also reflected intentions of making another serious step into the storage market.

Dell was one of the first to adopt AMD’s new Opteron server chipset. Alongside boxes from HP and several other manufacturers, the Dell PowerEdge R715 now ships with 16-core AMD processors in it. In August it introduced two completely overhauled products: the   PS4100 and PS6100 iSCSI arrays, offering greater density with the several different versions available to customers.