The Texan hardware maker Dell recently marked its foray into the cloud arena, with a deal with VMware allowing the company to offer a service which enables businesses to rent computers from an infrastructure-as-a-service cloud, while laying special stress on security.

On Monday, the VMworld in Las Vegas witnessed Dell and VMware jointly announcing the Dell Cloud with VMware vCloud Datacenter Services – bringing Dell in direct competition with existing cloud providers like Google, Amazon, IBM, and HP.

The Dell Cloud service – which will use security technology from Dell's acquisition of SecureWorks, as well as products from VMware and Trend Micro – will be Dell's first for public clouds; and it will chiefly target businesses which are looking to move to a cloud, while retaining a familiar VMware-based interface.

According to the information shared by Dell, the service will allow customers to access rentable virtual CPUs, along with memory, storage networks, IP addresses and firewalls. In addition, there will also be a specific edition for hybrid clouds, in which VMware vCloud Connector will provide businesses with a single portal to help them manage on and off-premise clouds.

In a Monday statement, Dell noted that “Dell and VMware will provide infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) choice for customer organisations, hosting and outsourcing firms, system integrators and service providers,” and added: “The offer provides automation, multi-level security and availability, in order to manage on-demand capacity, workload scalability, and other tasks.”