One of the companies that cares about cloud computing, of course, is Dell, which is thrilled to have been picked to be the sole provider of the hardware infrastructure and related data center design services for Microsoft's Azure Services Platform, an alternative to the EC2 cloud computing effort created by Amazon that Microsoft announced this week at its Professional Developer Conference. Azure is a compute and storage cloud for running Windows applications created using Visual Basic and C# and using a modified version of SQL Server for data storage.

To build the Azure data center, Microsoft has engaged Dell's Data Center Solutions division, an independent unit of the company - which has its own research, design, manufacturing, marketing, and sales employees - that was expressly created in the spring of 2006 to chase the cloud computing-Web 2.0-utility computing opportunity. DCS makes custom servers tuned for specific workloads and data center power and cooling envelopes. It does not sell standard PowerEdge iron and PowerVault storage.

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