Blade Watch

HP.com

HP today unveiled new solutions within its Adaptive Infrastructure (AI) portfolio that fundamentally change the way technology is used to deliver business services, while also reducing overall infrastructure costs and data center complexity.⁽¹⁾

HP BladeSystem Matrix (Matrix) is the industry’s first converged software, server, storage and networking platform that automates service delivery for the data center. HP Matrix Orchestration Environment provides a unified management interface to rapidly design, deploy and optimize the application infrastructure.

Together, these offerings create an integrated pool of resources that operate in both physical and virtual environments, creating the first truly business-ready infrastructure.

This powerful combination dramatically simplifies complex infrastructure tasks such as disaster recovery, capacity planning, consolidation and provisioning. As a result, companies can save nearly 80 percent in operational costs and realize payback in as little as eight months, with a potential return on investment in three years of over 300 percent.⁽²⁾

Through a self-service portal, Matrix provides chief information officers with a push button approach to accelerating the provisioning of the infrastructure for applications. It also dynamically assigns resources to meet the needs of the business in minutes versus weeks or months. Resources are assigned to requests as needed, and then returned to the pool once the service requirements are completed, optimizing utilization of the infrastructure.

I’m genuinely excited about the concept. Anything we can do to empower the end user community to orchestrate, to give the end user great control and see IT as an enabler to their business has to be a good thing. That as an end user I can provision servers in line with my business requirements helps illustrate IT as an enabler to business, allows IT to focus on strategy, to service improvement, managing and identifying longer term issues, application memory leaks, issues with the infrastructure which might need optimization. This need not be a threat to roles in the IT world, it’s simply a switch of your server guy from installing Windows to creating Windows builds, to server engineering and greater time to add value to the business teams, a move from the nuts and bolts to the bigger picture.

There will be comments, we can achieve similar end results using a mixture of different products, that the best results are achieved when using the range of products and technologies that are bundled in with the HP product suite. However, let us not detract from two things, firstly that HP have brought together a range of technologies to enable their customers to do this ‘out of the box’ using one interface, secondly, can we as an industry not agree that going forward this kind of solution, this kind of way of working is where we should be moving towards?  Should we not be working with the end user community to provide them with the tools they need? By offering the option to provision or rebuild a server, do we not reduce the delays to excellence? Do we not illustrate what could be achieved if we had the right investment, the right business buy in? In effect does this kind of concept whether it’s Altiris with IBM blades and networks guy configuring the blade switches or BladeSystem Matrix, not show how IT can deliver when the application and the infrastructure are in step, what we can achieve with the first step towards the next generation infrastructure? What could we achieve with grid? With Virtualization and cloud?

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