Dell announced new EqualLogic storage blade arrays and the next release of its end-to-end private-cloud infrastructure solution vStart Monday, making another move in the arms race among the largest IT players to provide as much of the IT infrastructure today’s data center customers need as possible.

Laura DuBois, program VP at the market research firm IDC, said Dell continued to execute well on its strategy that consisted of a series of additions to its enterprise portfolio, followed by timely integration of its products with acquired technologies.

“Dell's growing end-to-end capabilities put the company in a compelling position to truly help customers reduce the complexity of IT and provide bottom-line savings through reduction in space, power and operational management,” she said.

The new version of Dell’s private-cloud infrastructure solution vStart (vStart 1000) includes the company’s Compellent storage and its Force10 networking switches, integrated with PowerEdge M620 servers. The solution includes Dell’s VIS Creator software for cloud automation.

The new EqualLogic PSM4110 Blade Arrays pack functionality of the traditional EqualLogic enterprise-grade storage into a Dell PowerEdge M1000e blade chassis. Combining the arrays with the latest-generation PowerEdge blade servers and Force10 or PowerConnect networking switches in a single blade enclosure turns the enclosure into an end-to-end data center infrastructure solution.

This is the first pre-tested and certified Converged Blade Data Center solution by Dell. Specifically, it includes its 12-th generation PowerEdge M420 blade servers, Force10 MXL switches and the new EqualLogic blade arrays, all interconnected with 10GbE.

It is a full data center (sans power and cooling) in a single PowerEdge M1000e chassis.

These are Dell’s first storage blade arrays. They are designed to support virtualized environments, converged infrastructure and small and medium-size general storage deployments.

Their storage capacity is 14 terabytes per array. With two groups of blades inside one chassis, maximum capacity is 56 terabytes per chassis.

The arrays have advanced integration capabilities with Microsoft, VMware and Linux, Dell said.

Dell plans to make the blade arrays and the Converged Blade Data Center solution, along with the latest releases of EqualLogic Array software and SAN Headquarters (a monitoring and analysis tool) available in the third quarter of its fiscal 2012.

vStart 1000 will be available in July, the company said.