Dell announced at the company’s Dell World enterprise users conference in Austin, Texas, their partnership with Red Hat, where they will start selling systems early next year that run Red Hat’s version of the OpenStack open-source cloud platform.

Dell and Red Hat will work together to engineer the system, now built using Dell hardware and the next version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform. The package will use Red Hat’s Linux OpenStack Platform 4, which is currently in beta.

Dell really does not have much of a cloud story, and the ability to resell Red Hat cloud stuff will provide one.  Both companies are innovative, and have some good technology to sell in the cloud computing marketplace.  Dell, of course, more on the hardware side, with Red Hat on the software and cloud services side.

This is not much of an announcement, in terms of impact in the marketplace, but certainly a positive for both companies.  I suspect that both Dell and Red Hat will have larger impacts in the space than most understand, and Dell getting behind an OpenStack deployment is perhaps the way to get there.