Dell is setting up a team in Bangalore, India, to design enterprise servers and storage products, a company executive said Friday.

The center will do full system design of enterprise and storage products, which will address the design of the board, the BIOS, the chassis, the system's thermal characteristics and acoustics, and software porting, said Vivek Mansingh, country manager and director of the Dell India R&D Center.

Dell of Round Rock, Texas, already does hardware design in Asia in China, Singapore and Taiwan, but these centers are focused on other product lines of the company, Mansingh said. The center in Taiwan focuses on notebook design with some server design, the center in China does desktop design, and Singapore focuses on designing Dell's printing and imaging products, he added.

Currently, the company's enterprise products are mainly designed in Austin, Texas. "We are not moving the work out of Austin," Mansingh said. " We are growing so fast as a company that we need more products and we are expanding our engineering capabilities worldwide."

Many large multinational computer companies have software operations in India, but have not designed their main hardware there. The expertise for hardware design is available in India, but has not been utilized, Mansingh said.

Dell India R&D Center is the company's second largest product development center, behind Austin. The center develops and tests the company's OpenManage systems management software and related software. The center also does performance testing and tweaking of applications, middleware, and operating systems on Dell's server clusters, and also tests some of the company's hardware.

The center has started recruiting hardware designers in India, and expects to do its first design by next year. A dual-processor server and a storage product will be the first from the center, Mansingh said.

Dell is doubling the number of engineers at the center from about 300 to about 600 in the next 12 to 18 months. Some of the new hires will be hardware designers.

Dell has call center operations in India to support its customers worldwide, and has announced plans to make its products in India.

The IDG News Service is a Network World affiliate.