IT vendor and provider of data center services Dell is planning to bring online 10 modular data centers around the world within the next 24 months. The new facilities will be used primarily to support a variety of cloud-based services the company plans to provide.

Steve Schuckenbrock, president of Dell’s Services division, said in a call with reporters the company plans to launch data centers in the US, EMEA and Asia. "This is a confirmation of our intent to build 10 new incremental data centers", he said.

"The data centers will largely be modular and oriented toward cloud capabilities. We’ve announced plans to host Azure clouds, VMware clouds, as well as OpenStack clouds. We’re going to have cloud platforms that customers demand."

Upcoming cloud services will include both private and public cloud set-ups, but Schuckenbrock said Dell was more interested in helping customers build private clouds on their own or on the provider’s premises and use public clouds for capacity bursts.

The services will include Infrastructure-as-a-Service, Platform-as-a-Service, Virtual Desktop-as-a-Service and IT outsourcing. Under the IaaS umbrella, Dell will provide both compute and storage capacity.

Schuckenbrock did not reveal much detail about design of the new data centers apart from saying they would be modular. The company’s managing Australia director Joe Kremer told itnews in November, however, that the company had a third-generation Modular Data Center design that was not using shipping containers, as many modular data centers do.

The modules are pre-manufactured and delivered to the data center construction site for assembly. A module is built around a steel frame and can support up to 12 standard server racks, or up to 2,500 servers.

At the time, the company had plans to build data centers using the MDC design for its customers around the world. One of the customers that took advantage of the service was Australian data center service provider Tier5, for whom Dell built an 8MW modular data center in a former car manufacturing plant.

Dell’s full-stack virtualized environment now on the market
The company also announced a new hardware solution designed to help customers deploy cloud environments. The new vStart is a complete virtual-infrastructure solution that will come ready to provide 100 or 200 virtual machines through a single management environment.

vStart hardware consists of Dell’s PowerEdge servers, EqualLogic Storage and PowerConnect switches. It also includes hypervisors, virtualization-management extensions and deployment services.

The solution comes directly from a Dell factory as one unit, racked and cabled. It is currently only supporting VMware but the vendor plans to add support for other hypervisors "in the coming quarters."

The 100-VM version of vStart is priced at US$99,000 and the 200-VM one is $169,000, Schuckenbrock said. It is now available in the US and is scheduled to become available in select European countries in July, followed by a phased global roll-out.