Microsoft announced the limited production release of the Windows Azure platform appliance, a turnkey cloud platform for large service providers and enterprises to run in their own data centers.

Customers and initial partners using the appliance in their data centers will have the scale-out application platform and data center efficiency of Windows Azure and SQL Azure offered by Microsoft today.

Dell and Microsoft announced a strategic partnership in which Dell intends to use the Windows Azure platform appliance as a part of its Dell Services Cloud to develop and deliver cloud services.

The Windows Azure platform appliance will allow Dell to deliver private and public cloud services for Dell and its enterprise, public, small and medium-sized business customers. Dell will also work with Microsoft to develop a Dell-powered Windows Azure platform appliance for enterprise organizations to run in their data centers.

Dell has been custom-designing infrastructure solutions for the leading global cloud service providers and hyperscale data center operators for the past three years. Through this customer insight, Dell has developed deep expertise about the specialized needs of organizations in hosting, HPC, Web 2.0, gaming, social networking, energy, SaaS, plus public and private cloud builders.