And BladeSystem Matrix is your lens.  If you want to understand how the the convergence of the racked, stacked and wired world changes the rules of the game, start with Matrix. 

We've talked a lot about  convergence over the last year and how it's more than just consolidating stuff. It's the fusion of infrastructure, processes, physical with virtual, facilities . . . everything . . . to create something completely new. That's why in a converged world, things start to look differently. 

Take for instance this picture.  What is the "face of Matrix"?

Did you say the rack on the left (and the stuff inside) or did you say the screen on the right (Matrix Orchestration Environment)?

As I spoke with Esther and Brad at the Matrix booth, I was curious what customers saw.   No one wanted to see inside the server, the enclosure, the switch.  It didn't matter.  That's just the pool of resouces.  The "WOW" came from how easy it was to design the architecture, do capacity planning, combine virtual and physical, set up disaster recovery and automate provisioning of complex infrastructure.  Configuring and provisioning the network, storage, and compute "just happen" within the Matrix. Right on!  One infrastructure, any workload, on the fly.  That's is the future the private cloud delivers to your data center. 

I was thrilled to hear that so many folks get it.  Connect the dots a little further . . . in a POD, from the cloud, in the rain, on a train, in a box, with a fox - you can have your infrastructure any way you want it.

In that future, you won't care about the stuff inside; only the services delivered, what they costs and how fast you can get them.  The future I see coming into focus is the converged infrastructure (melding the best of HP: NonStop, SuperDome, XP, EVA, LeftHand, ProLiant, ProCurve, and BladeSystem) all controlled and interconnected as one. Inside that "matrix cloud".  You decide how to carve up the best resources for your workloads and data and Matrix does the rest.