The systems are not like typical servers and won't appeal to all customers. They strip out some features, like redundant power supplies, to make the servers more energy efficient, but that also makes them less reliable. They are designed to run in specialized cloud environments with software that can route around hardware failures and keep applications running.

That means selling them will require education for both Dell's sales teams and its customers. But they could help Dell to compete better with rival cloud offerings like HP's Extreme Scale-Out systems, IBM's iDataPlex servers and power-optimized cloud products from SGI and others.

"We're going to be very clear to our sales force and our customers that these are for those rarefied environments where you have this type of software infrastructure," Barton George, Dell's cloud evangelist, said in an . "If you were to run SAP or a database or a file server on one of these systems it would be a disaster. It wouldn't work."

Dell's first turnkey cloud package is a platform-as-a-service offering that addresses "the key issues around Web application development and deployment," which Dell says are unpredictable traffic, the fear of under-provisioning, and migration from development to production. The package bundles Dell's C servers with cloud software from Joyent and some implementation and support services.