Terremark is standardizing the storage side of infrastructure supporting its cloud services on EMC, the companies announced Wednesday.

This is a big win for EMC. Verizon-owned Terremark has about 50 data centers around the world and is one of the biggest providers of infrastructure cloud services.

Today, big IT vendors, such as EMC, HP, Dell and others, are racing to capitalize on the market for technology used by providers like Terremark and its competitors to build their cloud services.

Terremark’s deal with EMC is for storage, back-up and replication technologies across the data centers hosting the provider’s Enterprise Cloud Private Edition, which gives users isolated dedicated cloud infrastructure and a lot of control over it – as well as its public- and hybrid-cloud offerings.

The two companies said they were also going to work together to create new cloud-based solutions.

Bill Scanell, executive VP for the Americas and EMEA at EMC, said EMC, Verizon and Terremark had worked together for almost a decade, and Wednesday’s announcement extended the relationship.

David Small, chief platform officer for Verizon Enterprise Solutions, said EMC offered advanced cloud-optimized infrastructure technology. “Together, we can harness the power of our disruptive innovations to help customers increase their business value,” he said.

HP, one of EMC’s major competitors in the service-provider-cloud market, made a number of cloud announcements at its Discover conference in Las Vegas earlier this week, showing an aggressive cloud strategy.

While EMC is a much more established player in the storage market, HP has a full product portfolio for building cloud infrastructure from top to bottom. In addition, HP is itself a provider of cloud services with a sharp focus on the enterprise-cloud market.

EMC entered the cloud-provider space in February by forming a company together with VMware and Atos called Canopy. Canopy’s portfolio includes Software-as-a-Service, Platform-as-a-Service and Infrastructure-as-a-Service, a private-cloud service that can be deployed both on and off the customer’s premises.

Banding together to provide cloud technologies and services has been a commonly adopted strategy for large IT vendors tackling the cloud market.

EMC has a partnership with Cisco and VMware to deliver a full-stack hardware-and-software cloud-infrastructure solution. Called Vblock, the solution uses EMC storage, Cisco networking and Unified Compute System servers and VMware’s virtualization platform.

HP has a deal with Microsoft, delivering together a similar solution plus Microsoft applications, while Dell has a full-stack cloud-infrastructure solution that can be virtualized on either VMware or Microsoft.