Electronics giant Dell announced it has plans to invest more than $1 billion in new datacenters offering cloud services, as well as other offerings, to its customers. Going down the same path Hewlett-Packard is following under CEO Leo Apotheker, Dell has just reached the first milestone towards its expansion beyond just the comparatively low margin hardware market.

Dell will invest the $1 billion in building 10 new cloud datacenters worldwide in the next 2 years, as well as in increasing its sales force and setting up 12 “solutions centers” containing labs designed to help customers choose and optimize the offering(s) they’re interested in. Dell spends $50 billion a year to support revenues of $61 billion, but the announcement is still a significant one nevertheless.

“Over 15 months, Dell has made nine acquisitions related to everything from new services platforms to storage. All of them are helping to build up Dell’s capability to serve customers at “every layer of the architecture,” said Steve Schuckenbrock, president of Dell Services, in a conference call with reporters.”

Today’s announcement of Dell’s massive cloud investment comes a couple days after the news of the Dell Silicon Valley Research and Development Center. Dell expects to double its Silicon Valley workforce to 1,500 people.

Dell is not the only who’ve been stirring some buzz in the cloud lately. News crossed the wire yesterday that Apple has made a deal with EMC’s Isilon Systems unit to order as much as 12 petabytes worth of data storage to manage the video download of iTunes customers. The announcement coincides with the launch of a new line of hardware and software, including the enhanced Isilon OneFS 6.5 OS integrated with IBM’s with Tivoli Storage Manager.

Pushing 2 more tech giants into the frame, HP just cranked up its competition with Cisco. The company partnered up with Egenera to bring converged networking expertise and improved disaster recovery for data centers.