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From Dell’s April 7, 2011 announcement on cloud - Global Data Centers Expand Cloud Computing Capabilities Over the next 24 months, Dell will build multiple highly efficient data centers around the world to provide its customers access to public and private cloud technologies and its world-class IT outsourcing capabilities. Bringing together Dell’s technology and services prowess with state-of-the-art capabilities from its partners, these new data centers will allow customers to take advantage of Infrastructure- and Virtual Desktop-as-a-Service offerings as well as IT outsourcing.

Dell’s customers will now be able to: * Take advantage of scalable and flexible resources to better support growth and control costs for efforts such as application development and testing or dynamic workloads like customer facing applications with Compute-as-a-Service. * Get access to needed storage for production environments, off-premise back up and disaster recovery with Storage-as-a-Service unlimited storage available for production environments, off-premise back up and disaster recovery with Storage-as-a-Service. * Centralize, secure and more easily manage user data while facilitating a more remote and mobile workforce through Virtual Desktop-as-a-Service.

New Solution Centers Provide Blueprints for the Future Dell will open 12 Global Solution Centers this year and is planning 10 more over the next 18 months, to better bring open, capable and affordable solutions to organizations around the world. This global network of solution centers will provide a backdrop for customers to learn about Dell’s industry-focused solutions and domain expertise. At the Global Solution Centers, Dell experts work with customers to help them make better use of their technology budgets so they can invest less on managing their infrastructure and more on technology innovation to grow their business.

Through Proof of Concept testing to make sure the solution will work in the customers’ environment and Architectural Design Workshops based on the customers’ business needs, Global Solutions Centers give Dell’s customers and partners another resource to help solve data center challenges. New Solutions for the Virtual Era Dell today launched new Next Generation Data center, End-User Computing and Email Archiving solutions that enable efficiency and innovation from the core to the edge. Next Generation Data Center Computing * Dell vStart -Dell is delivering a new faster path to build virtual infrastructures aimed at accelerating our customers’ journey to cloud computing. Dell vStart accelerates and simplifies virtualization adoption by providing an easy way to purchase a complete virtual infrastructure solution delivered ready to run physical and virtual workloads. With vStart an entire functioning virtual infrastructure solution is delivered ready to run up to 100 or 200 virtual machines from a single management environment - including Intel Xeon-based Dell PowerEdge servers, Dell EqualLogic storage, Dell PowerConnect switches, deployment services, hypervisors, and essential virtualization management extensions.

The infrastructure is delivered pre-assembled to the customer’s site as a single unit, racked and cabled, and directly from the Dell factory. With included initial deployment services, vStart can help customers build out the infrastructure required to host virtual machines. Dell vStart currently supports VMware and support for other hypervisors is planned in the coming quarters. * Dell|Microsoft Management and Virtualization Solutions Partnership: Today Dell and Microsoft announced a three-year strategic initiative to help customers quickly deploy and manage virtualization and private cloud technologies. Management solutions will be based on Dell’s Virtual Integrated System, Dell Advanced Infrastructure Manager and Microsoft System Center and will deliver improved integration across the physical, virtual and application layers.

Virtualization solutions will be based on Microsoft Windows Server Hyper-V, which delivers strong workload performance and can help lower total cost of ownership. Future jointly-engineered solutions based on Dell’s hardware and virtualization management technologies and Microsoft’s hypervisor and systems management technologies will simplify virtualization management, reduce costs and remove barriers to cloud adoption.

Dell offers a single management point for physical and virtual resources that speeds provisioning of heterogeneous hardware in a mixed environment.