HP Blade System Matrix, the private cloud computing solution HP was showing off at Oracle Open World, combines a fully integrated hardware configuration of blade servers, storage, and networking infrastructure. In addition, the Insight Orchestration software layer makes provisioning available resources fairly painless through a well designed template system. Having gone through the process of configuring cloud computing environments without these tools, I’m acutely aware of just how obtuse cloud configuration can be. HP eliminates most of the guess work with this system.

In the video included here, I get walked through the hardware components making up a Blade System Matrix private cloud configuration. Then the interview jumps over to walking through building a provisioning request of available resources.

While I don’t have any hands on experience to speak directly to any total cost of ownership involved in this setup, gauging against my previous experience with cloud deployment, this definitely looks like it should drive IT costs down for many companies. It also should help network engineering teams look like heroes to the rest of the company because properly configured Matrix systems will eliminate a large portion of the IT bottleneck experienced at so many companies.