The company already ships products that are enabled for VMware, Microsoft's Hyper-V and XenServer hypervisors, a thin piece of software that unites multiple operating systems on a server and allocates resources accordingly.
Dell offers customers a blueprint of technologies that can be used in data centers to cut energy costs.
"We come in and show [customers] how to virtualize their data center, then we get out of the way and let them save some money," Becker said. Dell also plans to leverage its Web site and the cloud to help customers manage virtual images.
Cutting energy costs also depends on balancing energy consumed by components like chipsets and fans. Dell plans to improve power management technologies bundled in servers, but declined to provide further details.
The company is also working with partners to make power supplies more energy efficient. Typically more efficient power supplies cost more, but Dell is trying to provide maximum efficiency at a cost affordable to server customers. As the energy efficiency of power supplies increases, the component's cost is mitigated by higher supply volumes, Esser said.
Dell is reenergizing its data center hardware development with a renewed message surrounding power efficiency and high-quality products, said Jean Bozman, research vice president at IDC.
The company is telling IT managers to be mindful and smart when addressing powering and cooling data centers during these tough economic times, Bozman said. According to an IDC survey in 2008, 21.8 percent of IT managers surveyed felt power and cooling as the top challenge facing data centers.
Many servers during the dot-com period were employed to fill Web capacity without keeping power and cooling in mind, Bozman said. Data centers at that time had a mix of large and small servers, while small servers dominate data centers today.
Dell also wants IT managers to chuck old gear that is least energy efficient, and move workloads to new energy-efficient servers capable of virtualization, Bozman said.
Since Michael Dell came back to lead the company in 2007, it has taken a different approach to engineering technologies for enterprise servers and storage products, Dell's Becker said.
"The very first thing we asked as a trade-off was around energy efficiency because we knew...if we were going to deliver the most value to customers, it's going to be around the most effective use of energy. Doing that right saves them a bunch of money over low-acquisition costs even if it's a more expensive power supply," Becker said.