It’ll provide vCPUs, memory, storage networks, IP addresses, firewalls and catalog capabilities.

The widgetry, called simply Dell Cloud, is still in closed beta with a half-dozen customers ahead of expected rollout in the fourth quarter in the US and next year in EMEA and Asia Pacific-Japan. There should be a public beta in September.

It’s just a first IaaS move. Dell means to add Azure and OpenStack next year. (Remember earlier this year when Dell said it would put a billion dollars into new data centers?)

Tying up with VMware makes sense for Dell because it reportedly has one of the largest installed bases of VMware and, besides having its own public cloud, Dell means to sell private and hybrid clouds and mount other people’s public clouds around the VMware widgetry.

Those private clouds can be at a customer’s data center or Dell’s leveraging VMware’s vSphere and vCloud Director and Dell’s own vStart. The hybrids can use VMware’s vCloud Connector.

VMware says Dell is one of the first providers authorized to provide its vCloud Datacenter Services for enterprise-class, secure, public, private and hybrid clouds. So are Singapore Telecommunications, Softbank, CSC and Verizon.

Dell expects to sell hardware, software, services and consulting on the back of these clouds. It’s targeting customer organizations, hosting and outsourcing firms, system integrators and service providers.

What it expects to bring to the party is the promise of multi-layer enterprise security based on SecureWorks acquisition and partnerships with VMware and Trend Micro.

Dell’s cloud is supposed to be pay as you go, reserved and dedicated. No indication of actual pricing yet.

GigaOm says the pricing model will make reserved and dedicated more appealing with a lower hourly cost per VM, they’ll need a one-year commitment at a minimum resource level and the pay-as-you-go best for testing the service. It suspect Dell’s Azure and OpenStack widgetry will offer better pay-as-you-go will compete more with Amazon, Rackspace, GoGrid and Microsoft.

Since HP outbid it for 3PAR, Dell is now proposing to buy Compellent Technologies, another storage house, for $27.50 a share cash, which puts it in the vicinity of $900 million.

Compellent’s price had soared way above Dell’s threshold on press reports and viral speculation by early Thursday morning when the companies announced they were in “advanced discussions” and had cut an “exclusive” merger agreement, admitting, since HP trumped Dell weeks after Dell thought it had 3PAR in the bag for practically half the price HP wound up paying, that the transaction may not be consummated.

They say they won’t say anything else.

The New York Times called the deal at the price Dell’s offering a “takeunder.” It’s something like 18.3% less than the $33.65 Compellant hit on Wednesday.

The deal isn’t going to do Dell’s long-term reseller relationship with EMC any good either. Since the 3PAR fiasco they’ve supposedly been trying to repair bridges. Guess they missed a few holes.

EMC recently paid $2.25 billion, a 28.8% premium, for little Isilon Systems.

Compellent sells so-called customized “flexible” data storage to the mid-market in competition with EMC and may be selling out cheap.

According to Reuters Compellent is being advised by Morgan Stanley having interviewed but passed on Frank Quattrone’s Qatalyst Partners, which brought in the home run for 3PAR.

Needless to say, storage is key to cloud computing.

Dell has reorganized his year-old Communications Solutions Group out of existence, spreading its tablets like the poorly received Android-based Streak, phones like its Aero and Venue Pro and laptops like the pricey Adamo around its primary business groups: large enterprises, government, SMBs and consumer.

Development of any next-generation widgets will move under Jeff Clarke, who’s responsible for PC engineering, design and development as well as manufacturing, procurement and supply chain.

The Wall Street Journal figures it means Dell continues to have turnaround issues and trouble breaking out of it old mold of selling computers to business.

Dell told the SEC Garriques, who original came to Dell to run its consumer PC business, will get $1.44 million in severance and a $378,000 incentive bonus for this fiscal year as well as roughly $6.3 million for the consulting gig. Under his watch Dell sold more consumer PCs but made slimmer margins.

Dell’s supposed to start selling a 10-inch half-tablet, half-clamshell netbook with keyboard on November 23 called the Inspiron Duo. The thing reportedly runs Windows 7 on a dual-core Atom chip. It’s supposed to be more productive than an iPad. Dell’s lackluster Streak device is half-smartphone, half-tablet. They may explain why Dell has shut down its mobile business unit.

The AP remarks that the fine isn’t that large but “the decision to charge a sitting chief executive of a major company and reach a seven-figure settlement with him is rare.”

The director of the SEC’s Enforcement Division Robert Khuzami issued a statement saying, “Accuracy and completeness are the touchstones of public company disclosure under the federal securities laws. Michael Dell and other senior Dell executives fell short of that standard repeatedly over many years, and today they are held accountable.”

The deal includes the payment of a $4 million civil penalty by former Dell CEO Kevin Rollins and a $3 million penalty by former CFO James Schneider as well as $83,096 in restitution and $38,640 in interest. Former regional VP of finance Nicholas Dunning will pay a $50,000 penalty.

Nobody of course admits to being guilty of anything. There is however a permanent injunction forbidding Dell to fiddle any more and it has to hire an independent consultant to spiff up its “disclosure processes, practices and controls.” Michael Dell has also been enjoined against repeats.

Dell employees jigged its numbers to meet expectations. In 2007 Dell restated four years worth of financial reports indicating that revenues had been overstated by $359 million and earnings by $92 million. The company also caught flak over the payments from Intel that it treated as revenue.

The SEC said Dell never explained how payments from Intel from 2002-2006 in exchange for not using AMD chips inflated its numbers and let it meet its earnings targets or how when the payments were cut when it finally started using AMD chips it never explained why its numbers dropped.

In the glory days Dell even asked Intel for bigger payments to make the quarter. By the time, it put AMD in its line Dell was getting 76% of its operating income from Intel.

The upticks that the Intel payments created were explained away as being due to cost-cutting, declining component costs or execution.

The company established a $100 million reserve last month.

To start, it’s going to sell turnkey private PaaS solutions made up of pre-tested, pre-assembled and fully supported hardware, software and services.

It says it’s targeting enterprise app developers – with perhaps smaller appetites – who want to develop applications in the cloud that will be deployed in the cloud – as well as Web Service providers and social networking sites.

The widgetry is supposed to address the key issues around web application development and deployment: unpredictable traffic, the fear of under-provisioning and migration from development to production.

Dell has picked enterprise IaaS specialist Joyent to power private on-premise clouds as part of a new Dell Cloud Solution (DCS) for Web Applications, a PaaS instance of what Dell calls its “Revolutionary” cloud solutions.

It’s the first time Joyent software, usually used in public clouds, is being integrated with a third-party solution and the start-up calls it “a critical turning point in the industry with a single software platform enabling public, private, and hybrid cloud solutions.”

Joyent, a one-time web hoster, considers itself wizard at scaling applications and hardware utilization. It’s also supposed to have simple GUI tools to create and manage complex virtual architectures.

Dell is rumored to be an investor in Joyent.

Dell has also partnered up with Aster Data Systems for its massively parallel SQL-MapReduce-based data management and analysis, Linux purveyor Canonical for the open source Eucalyptus IaaS private cloudware inside its latest Ubuntu distribution, and Green Plum, the open source self-service data warehouser.

Naturally Dell means to keep working with VMware and Microsoft on what it calls the “Evolutionary cloud side.”

The new line of Azure-inspired “hyperscale” PowerEdge C servers – which will sell into the Joyent play and compete with, say, HP’s Extreme Scale-Out systems- include three models, the C1100, C2100 and C6100, targeting HPC, data analytics, gaming and cloud builders.

Of course, the high-density, energy-efficient widgets – said to be fast and easy-to-deploy infrastructure solutions that speed up time to revenue and dramatically reduce TCO – are meant for public clouds too.

The C1100 is described as a high-memory, power-efficient, cluster-optimized compute node server; the C2100 as a high-performance data analytics, cloud compute platform and cloud storage server; and the C6100 as a four-node cloud- and cluster-optimized shared infrastructure server. Pricing is still up in the air; at least Dell didn’t say what it was. Ditto configurations.

They are designed specifically cloud environments with software that can route around hardware failures and so lack redundancy.

The hardware’s available now along with Dell’s consulting services, the Cloud Infrastructure solutions will be out in the next 30 days.

Dell says Microsoft will work with Dell on joint solutions that are built on industry standards and designed to use existing data center investments, all managed through a common framework.

“This approach,” it says, “is designed to enable customers to integrate private or public cloud computing models as their business requires. Dell and Microsoft will collaborate on Azure, with Dell and Microsoft offering services, and Microsoft continuing to invest in Dell hardware for Windows Azure infrastructure.”

Psion complained to Google on January 29 and ever since then Google Adwords has refused to handle any ads that include the word “netbook” in their text, effectively ending search advertising for the category.

So Dell last week asked the US Patent and Trademark Office to nullify Psion’s netbook trademark, issued on November 21, 2000 for a laptop that pretty much anticipated a modern day netbook, on the grounds of abandonment, fraud and genericness.

Dell’s charges mirror the ones Intel made a few days before in a 12-page complaint filed in district court in California.

Anticipating a demand for a heady amount of damages by Psion’s lawyers, Intel wants the judge to order the Commissioner of Trademarks of the United States to cancel Psion’s trademark; enjoin Psion from asserting any trademark right to the term “netbook”; and – most important to Intel – issue a declaratory judgment saying Intel didn’t infringe Psion’s trademark.

Intel and Dell both allege that Psion discontinued using the name netBook in 2003 and claim that when Psion filed a trademark registry extension on November 17, 2006, four days before the trademark would have died a natural death, it committed fraud on the PTO.

Psion, which filed for the trademark in 1996 and apparently still sells accessories for its netBook, swore that it was still using the netBook name and that it had used it “in commerce for five consecutive years after the date of registration or the date of publication.”

Intel say that’s not only baloney, that’s unfair competition and notes that in support of its declaration Psion attached an ad for the widget it last sold in 2003.

Although the word netbook started come into popular use in 2007, it was of course Intel that started to promote its use last year and it is Intel that owns the site www.netbook.com pitching Atom-based widgets although, as Intel tells the court, it’s not brand-specific. Some netbooks use VIA chips and Nvidia, Texas Instruments and Qualcomm have designs on the space.

Intel claims that there is “no alternative term with any appreciable usage that describes the netbook category” of notebook computers that are small, inexpensive, under-powered and specifically meant to access the net.

Intel claims that Psion had plenty of warning of the generic use of the word but “did little if anything to protect its purported rights, much less discharge its duty to police third-party uses of its purported trademark” before belatedly asserting its rights in December.

Intel lawyers tried persuading Psion that the word was generic by pointing to the 30 million hits that resulted from a Google search. Psion’s lawyer interpreted that as an indication of the scale of the potential damages, writing back that “Intel aided, abetted and otherwise induced manufacturers and retailers” to use the term.

Psion, the British part of the company, in its day created the worl’s first PDA.