Software giant Microsoft has teamed up with Dell to release 'cloud in a box’ product. The Microsoft CPS comprises Dell hardware with Windows Server 2012 R2, System Center 2012 R2 and Windows Azure Pack.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said that the enterprises of today and tomorrow demand a cloud platform that is reliable, scalable and flexible.

"With more than 80 percent of the Fortune 500 on the Microsoft cloud, we are delivering the industry's most complete cloud for every business, every industry and every geography," he said.

CPS scales from a single rack to up to four racks and is optimised for infrastructure-as-a-service for Windows and Linux and platform-as-a-service style deployments. It will be released next month, and is described as a collaboration between Microsoft and Dell to create a customer-focused system.

CPS can be installed at increments of one to four racks. A single rack offers 512 cores across 32 servers, 8TB of RAM with 256GB per server, 282TB of usable storage, 1360Gbps of internal rack connectivity, 560Gbps of inter-rack connectivity and as much as 60Gbps connectivity to the external world. Each rack can support some 2,000 virtual machines.