Future products will have more management features, Atashie said, and the company plans to announce MicroSlice servers later this quarter based on Intel CPUs, according to a slide in its presentation.

Rackable is marketing the servers as "a hardware-based approach to virtualization" that it calls "physicalization."

"Instead of paying for third-party software to break larger machines into smaller chunks, or virtual machines, we take a larger machine and divide it into much smaller physical nodes that are independent and can each be dedicated to a particular application," Atashie said.

"The benefits we're seeking are more cost-effective scaling, because the individual nodes are more granular and can grow in lower-cost chunks, and a compelling improvement in price/performance and performance per watt."

Mark Peters, a server analyst with Enterprise Strategy Group, said the "physicalization" marketing pitch may not be very helpful. "It's one of those cases where it's being dressed up as something fancy when in fact the basic idea is very simple," he said.