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Designing infrastructure the way IT wants to work
We've been on the Adaptive Infrastructure journey at HP for several years now. This week we are announcing an important milestone: BladeSystem Matrix. We've been really thinking a lot about how customers use IT and ways we can optimize IT infrastructure to make it work better for them. We recognize that infrastructure exists for applications, which exist for the business. So we've taken a business and application perspective on how an infrastructure ought to operate.
Deploying an application typically requires an IT architect or team of architects to carefully design the entire infrastructure - servers, storage, network, virtual machines - and then hand off the design to a team of people to deploy, which typically takes several weeks. This length of time is mostly an artifact of the way IT infrastructure is designed. So we decided to change this with BladeSystem Matrix. Now an architectural design is saved out as a template - servers, storage, virtual machines, network, server software image. Then when it is time to provision an application, it's as easy as saying "make it so" - and in a matter of minutes, the Matrix's converged virtualized infrastructure is automatically configured and the application is ready to run. In other words, the way it ought to be.
BladeSystem Matrix is the culmination of several years work at HP - creating an Adaptive Infrastructure that is simpler to buy, deploy and keep running optimally. Applications are easier to provision, maintain, and migrate. We've spent years proving out this architecture, not just in our labs but in real-world environments, with BladeSystem, Virtual Connect, and Insight Software - so we could learn how IT really operates - and more importantly - how it ought to operate.
Some people tell me Matrix's virtualization sounds sort of like a mainframe. Others say that the portal interface reminds them of cloud IT. I guess in a way they are all correct. But unlike those environments, Matrix will run off-the-shelf x86 applications. So I guess I've decided that Matrix is it's own thing.
