In an announcement Monday, officials with the Round Rock, Texas, company said integrating VMware's ESX Server technology into its 6650 systems brings virtualization into Dell's scale-out data center strategy.

Pete Morowski, Dell's vice president of software development, said such virtualization technology plays well into the scale-out initiative by enabling more applications to run on individual processors via the creation of virtual servers.

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"We believe our customers want to scale out their equipment, not scale it up with scale-up systems," Morowski said.

It also plays into an industry trend, he said. Numbers from International Data Corp. show that 98 percent of servers sold have four or fewer processors, according to Morowski.

In Dell's scale-out vision, multiple smaller systems with one to four processors are linked together to create a high-end computing environment while keeping the cost of such performance low. In addition, with VMware technology, users will be able to consolidate data center resources by taking applications off underused systems and running them on virtual machines in other servers, Morowski said.

The ESX software from VMware, a Palo Alto, Calif., company bought by storage giant EMC Corp. in December, also allows for two-CPU virtual machines.

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