Further details have emerged about Dell Inc.’s reported bid to takeover EMC Corp., with Re/Code claiming the former is only offering to buy part of the latter’s data storage business, rather than the entire company lock, stock and barrel.

That differs from The Wall Street Journal‘s original report, which suggested that Dell was trying to acquire the entire company. If Dell was to buy all of EMC, including its 80 percent stake in Vmware Inc., the deal would be one of the largest ever mergers in the tech industry.

Re/Code‘s account would certainly be more realistic, as it’s believed Dell would struggle to put the cash together to takeover EMC in its entirety, having taken on heavy debts when it went private in a $25 billion buyout barely two years ago. EMC has a market value approaching $50 billion, which means Dell would have to take on an enormous debt to raise the cash for a full acquisition. At present, Dell is believed to be saddled with around $12 billion in debt.

Re/Code‘s sources said that rather than selling the entire company, EMC is hoping to offload its VNX data storage operation, which is a part of its $16.5 billion information storage division. The sources added that the VNX data storage business pulls in around $3 billion in annual sales, although this can’t be confirmed because EMC doesn’t report sales figures for its products. Nevertheless, a smaller deal like this would certainly make better financial sense for Dell, while allowing it to further its ambitions in storage by selling higher-end equipment to larger companies. As for EMC, it’s recent focus has been on flash memory storage, which makes the VNX storage business non-essential.

For now, all of this remains speculation as neither EMC nor Dell was prepared to comment on the reports. All we do know is that EMC has been coming under enormous pressure from the activist investment firm Elliott Management Inc. since the beginning of this year. Elliott, which owns two percent of EMC, has been pushing for it to spin off its stake in VMware in order to “unlock value” for shareholders. Until now, EMC has resisted the pressure, but it was recently reported that Elliott was pushing for a definitive answer by the end of this month.

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