The new products include the Active System 800, which combines Dell servers, storage and network gear in a pre-assembled rack that it says customers can fire up quickly to deploy a virtual desktop infrastructure, a private cloud or business applications.

It also introduced Active System Manager, a template-based provisioning tool that can automate some of the repetitive steps in configuring servers, which it said will also reduce errors. Both products will be available in the U.S. in November and worldwide early next year, Dell said.

At the same time, Dell will phase out a line of similarly integrated systems that it introduced last year under the brand , said Tim Mattox, Dell's vice president of strategy, in an interview. Dell says the new Active Systems offer better hardware and management capabilities than the vStart systems they'll replace.

The Active System 800 comes in toward the high end of the vStart lineup. Dell will eventually offer other Active Systems at different price points to replace the other vStart products.

It's the latest step in a broader push by Dell to move beyond selling PCs and stand-alone servers and into higher-margin gear. It's bought several companies in support of the effort, including SonicWall, AppAssure and Scalent, and most recently, Quest Software for US$2.6 billion.