Red Hat and Dell have announced an alliance that will see the systems giant offer the new midrange Red Hat Application Appliance.

Dell is to begin selling its PE2970 system aimed at mid-sized companies looking for low-cost web and service oriented architecture applications.

The Opteron-powered system will include JBoss Application Server and Hibernation Framework, and will have Red Hat Enterprise, Apache and MySQL preinstalled.

"We saw a gap in the market to provide more potential customers with the benefits that our middleware solutions can deliver to small and medium-sized businesses," said Ronan Kirby, EMEA alliance manager at Red Hat.

"Partnering with Dell to ship the first plug-and-play open source Application Appliance has allowed us to offer more opportunities to businesses that previously found it prohibitive to deploy a middleware environment due to resource and budget restraints."

Red Hat will provide 24/7 support for the new systems.

Dell has been a somewhat hesitant entrant to the Linux market and has partnered in the past with Ubuntu for notebooks and desktops.

The new deal with Red Hat is part of a broadening of the company's offering to the increasingly strong enterprise Linux space.

"The Red Hat Application Appliance from Dell was developed with best-of-breed partners to provide a simple, easy-to-install product so that our customers don't waste unnecessary time and resources on maintenance and support," said Tara Woodhurst, EMEA marketing manager for custom factory integration at Dell.

"The solution delivers excellent security, manageability and power performance per watt and provides great value for businesses looking to balance scalability and cost."