Dell’s doing a great deal to move into the cloud services industry, and it latest development is the launch of a four-socket blade server with up to 48 processor cores, tagging high hopes of faster virtualization. The PowerEdge M915 blade will run on Advanced Micro Devices’ Opteron 6100 processors which as up to 12 cored, as announced by Mike Robertson, senior product manager at Dell. Its added cores caters more virtual machines which is capable of running databases and similar high-end applications. The server can handle large volumes of data in order to accelerate server performance in virtualized environments.

Mainly, the server has 10-gigbit Ethernet ports. For more networking ports, you can add adapters card. Having six 1-gigbit Ethernet ports ensues a 120 gigabit-per-second data transfer. The company preloads on an interneal SD card VMware’s ESxi hypervisor, but is also available with Microsoft’s Hyper-V and Citrix’s XenServer virtualization software. There are four operating systems to choose from: Windows Server, Red Hat Enterprise Linux or Novell Suse Linux Enterprise Server. The blade can handle up to 512GB of RAM and 2TB of internet storage which will be sold starting at USD3,500 worldwide.

The M915 blade fits into the M1000 chassis, and will socket-compatible with AMD’s Opteron chips called Interlagos which will be made available to the market soon. These chips will be shipped starting Q3.

We also recently spotted Dell Boomi to be working on integrating Java application with SaaS in the cloud, allowing multiple connection points between internal Java apps and external SaaS apps. It’s close competitors on blade server trends, IBM, extended the reach of its POWER7 RISC processor-based server lineup with two new blade servers which will run its new POWER7-based supercomputer, promising a performance of 80 teraflops.

“A new type of cloud vendor is focused solely on integration between you and various cloud vendors. These providers offer integration services cheaper and faster than the old way. New cloud-centric players, like Boomi, Cast Iron, and Jitterbit have forced this cloud-based approach. Boomi and Cast Iron have already been acquired by Dell and IBM, respectively. Both buyers cited the benefits of offering more streamlined integration connections across the enterprise,” Healy wrote in the report, “State of the Cloud 2011: Time for Process Maturation.”