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Dell opened a data center in Shanghai this week to host public and private clouds and to provide off-premise application and storage services.

The data center in China is first of its kind for Dell in the Asia Pacific. It will be used to conduct research and development of reference architectures for the cloud and storage services, as well as data movement between systems.

In April, Dell announced to invest US$1 billion over the next three years in its cloud, services and data storage offerings. Planned investments included the launch of multiple data centers worldwide and for conducting R&D in cloud computing and virtualization technologies. 

Dell in June opened a cloud computing center in Ireland and has centers in Singapore; Frankfurt, Germany; Washington, D.C.; Chicago and Austin, Texas. The company plans to open centers in Tokyo and Paris in a few months' time, and in Sydney, New York and Sao Paulo in the second half of the year, the company said in a blog entry.

By hosting cloud services, Dell is building out its services portfolio and also giving potential customers an opportunity to evaluate cloud computing models, said Charles King, principal analyst at Pund-IT.

Dell has been building its software and hardware portfolio to become a competitive enterprise services provider. Dell has acquired 11 companies in the last two years and is looking to buy more companies to build its intellectual property and product portfolio. 

"The hosting service market is a relatively spread out marketplace. Not only does it include IT vendors like IBM, Dell and HP, but it also includes traditional service providers and specialists," King said.

Dell has said the data centers it is building will provide virtual desktop services to centralize and secure data within organizations. The hosting services will be tied to consulting and outsourcing capabilities provided by the company. 

The data center could also provide potential clients with the opportunity to see how sample workloads would work in data centers, King said. Dell sells servers built on modular architectures for scale out environments, and such a data center could help company sell more servers and go deeper into the data center.

"The centers include IT environments that potential customers and developers can use to run test workloads. It's a kind of try-before-you-buy, equivalent of taking a car for a test drive," King said.