Data storage company EMC Corp. said Wednesday its profit dropped 17 percent in the third quarter, a decline caused by a big one-time gain from the sale of VMware Inc. shares in the year-ago period.

The Hopkinton, Mass.-based company’s profit still exceeded Wall Street’s expectations, a sign that demand for EMC’s machines held up well despite the ailing economy and trouble among competitors.

Its shares jumped 5.5 percent in AM trading.

Disappointing storage numbers last week from IBM Corp., one of EMC’s biggest rivals, and indications that week that Sun Microsystems Inc. will write down the value of its storage business raised fears about the health of the broader industry.

EMC helped ease some of those fears by reporting net income of $411.3 million, or 20 cents per share, for the July-September

period, 2 cents per share higher than the average estimate of analysts polled by Thomson Reuters.

The profit was 17 percent below year-ago earnings of $492.9 million, or 23 cents per share. Last year’s figures were boosted by EMC’s one-time sale of 6 million of its shares in VMware, a virtualization software maker, to Cisco Systems Inc.

VMware was a wholly owned subsidiary of EMC until its initial public offering of stock in August 2007. EMC still owns 84 percent of VMware.

EMC’s sales in the third quarter rose 13 percent to $3.72 billion. That was in line with the average analyst forecast.

Louis Miscioscia, an analyst with Cowen and Co., said he was surprised by the strength of the results considering many companies clamped…

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