HP's BladeSystem Matrix starts at US$150,000.

Liquid and HP have both criticized Cisco for focusing solely on virtualization at the expense of applications running on physical servers. Cisco documentation on the Unified Computing System say it does bare-metal operating environments, but HP says its own system goes a step further by managing physical and virtual resources from the same pane of glass.

HP's BladeSystem Matrix starter kit comes in a full rack with ProLiant blades; a StorageWorks array; HP Virtual Connect Flex-10 Ethernet and 8GB Fibre Channel modules; and Insight Dynamics software to manage and automatically provision resources. For virtualization, HP gives customers a choice of VMware, Microsoft and Citrix hypervisors.

Starter kits can be as small as a few blades in one rack, but expansion kits based on a modular architecture will let customers scale up without limits, Ganthier says.

HP Monday also announced a new LeftHand storage-area network product and other storage systems designed for virtual servers. The various new products are all based on the idea that there should be more flexible connections between servers and storage and that IT shops should be able to converge on a single infrastructure that eliminates complexity, according to HP. Ganthier promised several other announcements on this theme in the next couple of months.