Dell EMC has confirmed it’s getting into the Azure Stack business.

The company revealed its ardour for Microsoft’s hybrid cloud caper in September 2016, when it showed off a PowerEdge R730xd rack server running Redmond’s code.

Now the company has emitted a curious non-announcement in which it pledged the devices would offer “PowerEdge servers and Dell EMC Networking” and waxed lyrical about Azure Stack’s ability to help you be the disruptor, not the disrupted, along with some of the usual hybrid cloud equals agility yadda yadda.

Most of which we thought was a tad dull, given we already knew about the September announcement. So after a bit of back and forth Dell EMC told us its Azure Stack will come in three sizes – low, middle and high. Those rigs will be configured to handle 110, 400 and 600 virtual machines respectively and comprise four, eight and 12 servers.

Which sounds about right, given that as of Azure Stack Tech Preview Three we know that it needs at least twelve cores to go about its business.

Each of the house that Mike D built’s rigs will also have “a Dell EMC PowerEdge hardware lifecycle host and three Dell EMC Networking top of rack switches.”

There’s no word on storage but The Register expects and/or suspects the PowerEdge 630 and 730 that Dell offers as VSAN Ready Nodes would fit the bill, as they can hold nice quantities of disk. Perhaps some extra PowerVault DAS devices could help to scale storage, although given scale is what Azure does (when Microsoft’s not running out of servers) perhaps extra storage won’t be needed.

It’s widely believed Azure Stack will debut at either Microsoft’s “Inspire” conference in early July or the “Ignite” affair in late September. We mention that because Dell EMC says its hardware “is expected to be available … in the second half of calendar year 2017.”

The Register also understands that HPE is close to an announcement of its Azure Stack efforts, so clearly it won’t be too many months before the hybrid cloud market has a bold new entrant. ®