HP's got a private cloud-in-a-box scheme that it trotted out Monday ahead of VMworld called HP CloudStart that's supposed to provide the cloud-smitten enterprise that's hanging back everything it needs to get cloud-borne in a mere 30 days complements of HP's Cloud Consulting Services, so what it's gonna cost is anybody's guess. It's also promising that the platform will push out into a hybrid environment down the road.

HP will sell CloudStart, which is for compute services, in Asia-Pacific and Japan to start, expecting to go global in December.

The widgetry involves HP's BladeSystem Matrix, advertised as the "industry's first Converged Infrastructure solution," HP's Cloud Service Automation software and HP storage. HP claims it can cut provisioning times up to 80% with integration-free one-touch provisioning across infrastructure, applications and business services.

It also involves something called Cloud Maps to speed the deployment of VMware, SAP AG, Oracle and Microsoft software in engineered, tested and proven configurations. It described Cloud Maps as being imported directly into client cloud environments, enabling them to rapidly build a catalog of cloud services for the business.

Users deliver pay-per-use services from a self-service SaaS and maintenance portal that HP will run. It says the infrastructure scales, applications are optimized for the cloud computing and new services can be deployed automatically. Real-time access to consumption and chargeback reports operate like public clouds.

HP says its open architecture approach will let users integrate their private clouds with third-party enterprise portals, public cloud services, usage billing packages and multiplatform resource management.

It's got Carnegie Mellon using CloudStart to implement a private cloud environment that will serve as a test bed for research on private cloud computing. The school is replacing a bunch of dedicated clusters with a single cloud environment for running simulations and data analyses, as well as supporting data storage and data-intensive applications. The widgetry is using Samsung's energy-efficient Green DDR3 memory.

HP claims CloudStart can cut compliance-management time 75% because of automation and reduce TCO up to 56% versus traditional infrastructure.