"I like what they are doing," he added. "They're taking small, standard building blocks and letting you create them into the type of system you want."

The biggest challenge for Rackable will be convincing companies to try out a brand new server architecture, Peters said.

Rackable builds the systems to order and doesn't publish list prices, but Atashie said the servers start at less than $500.

Two of the servers are 1U, half-depth rack servers, the other two use Rackable's design, which does away with fans and the top of the server box to keep costs down and leave room for more disks and processors.

"We put in an internal switch to do a lot of the inter-node cabling, so there are only three cables coming out of each tray," Atashie said. "Otherwise you'd need a cable for each node and the amount of wiring would be unmanageable."