Dell's planning to open the Dell Silicon Valley Research and Development Center in Santa Clara as it moves to aggressively expand into networking design and development, storage development and cloud computing. The company says it will hire “several hundred” people in engineering, sales, marketing  and services to work at the 240,000-square-foot center. By the end of year, Dell expects 700 people to be working there. Much of its Northern California operations will be consolidated there, as well. It's not the first big hiring news from Dell this year. Earlier, we reported the company was looking for thousands of software engineers, technical support staff, product managers, storage engineers, enterprise and solutions architects, and sales people. Dell projects that 1,500 people will be working in the new center within five years. Then there's this from AllThingsD:

Dell is announcing a big push around cloud computing services today, and is promising to spend $1 billion in an effort to build 10 new data centers around the world between now and 2013 as key aspect of it.

Updated with AllThingsD report.