HP does datacentre DIY

Just spent the morning with HP looking at its new BladeSystem Matrix.

This software, which is based on technology acquired in 2007 with the purchase of Opsware and its datacentre management technology, sits on top of the server, storage and networking layers. Its job is to manage and provision datacentre resources.

So for example, as admin you can set up templates that include both resources and configuration of those elements. You point the system at a particular server OS image, tell the network how to find IP addresses and the right VLAN, and allocate storage from one or more LUNs. If as an end-user you want to provision a server, you pick up the template that fits your needs, and put in a request to the sysadmin to either sanction or deny that resource request.

The demo I saw looked slick and easy, with the software eliding the different technology and product-specific interfaces - VMware, EMC, Cisco, HP/IBM etc – into a single pane of glass. All things being equal, you could build a datacentre's worth systems in short order.

But all things aren't equal. As with all demos, it's hard to tell how much preparatory work had gone on. Obviously, you'd need, for example, the right OS image ready prepared, have the rights to spend departmental cash on an OS licence, and to allocate yourself some space from the storage pool, and own a whole host of other, company-specific privileges.

It's also the case that desktop virtualisation is a hot topic in many enterprises, driven in part at least both by Microsoft's end-of-lifeing XP and by a need for a more modern OS that supports newer hardware. BladeSystem Matrix doesn't yet allow you fully to provision a host of desktops, which have different resource requirements to servers. They need a place to store user profiles, a way of delivering applications, and – irony of ironies - 3D graphics support presumably from a bunch of GPUs. The days when you could say that graphics and servers go together like fishes and bicycles are about to end.

But I got the strong impression that this will come, in time. Meanwhile, HP sits at the top of the server market share table – it overtook IBM last month – partly driven, according to the company, by its inclusion of 10 gigabit Ethernet on the motherboard, which helps reduce the volume of cabling by slicing up and allocating bandwidth to individual virtual servers but pushed through a virtual switch with just two physical ports.

How will IBM respond?