When David Scott was CEO of storage startup 3PAR he argued that the economics of public cloud in particular require that service providers use best-of-breed components at every level. Now that 3PAR has been acquired by Hewlett-Packard, and its technology integrated into the HP stack, and Scott become HP’s Senior VP for Storage has he changed his tune? Not really, as Wikibon Chief Analyst David Vellante found when he asked that question on a live webcast interview on SiliconAngle.tv from HP Discover.

“The people trying to provide those cloud services have to build their infrastructures from best-of-breed components at every level, because they will be competing on the basis of the service level they can deliver at the lowest transactional cost,” he argues. “And if they use suboptimized elements in their infrastructure, they’re going to be at a disadvantage to competitors who choose best-of-breed at every level of the stack.”

However, he does not see his business decision to sell 3PAR to HP and join its unified stack as a contradiction. HP, he argues, has built a stack that, at this time, is made up of best-of-breed technologies, some developed in-house and others purchased over the last two years, at every level. He cites 3PAR, LeftHand, and IBRIX among other technologies in storage, and 3COM in networking, combined with HP’s internally developed strength in servers and blades, and exciting combinations of network and server technology in Flex Fabric Virtual Connect. All of these are integrated using open interface standards and managed with what he describes as best-of-breed orchestration and provisioning software in Cloud Systems Matrix.

In storage, for instance, 3PAR brings advanced technologies in multi-tenancy, the ability to handle diverse and unpredictable workloads, performance scaling, and efficiencies from technologies such as thin provisioning. All of these are needed for cloud computing. And IBRIX brings massively scale-out file systems technology to manage the huge amounts of unstructured data that includes both large numbers of items and very large items.

As a result, he says, a customer can say, “I can go for this entire integrated stack, knowing that I have best-of-breed elements at every point in the stack.”

Of course it is very hard for any vendor to maintain best-of-breed status throughout an integrated stack, and the need to maintain integrity and integration throughout a large vertical architecture has often forced suboptimization and reliance on older technologies at specific points in large vendors’ infrastructures long after startups have brought much newer technologies to market.

However, by buying a list of those startups and unifying them through open standards and a flexible management software system, HP has combined leading-edge technologies with the market power of a major worldwide player in the IT industry and has pre-integrated them, saving users the pain of integrating islands of best-of-breed automation in their data centers. And because the interfaces are based on open standards, HP offers the powerful argument that if a new best-of-breed technology appears in the market that offers specific advantages, its users can swap that into the stack with relatively little pain and without having to do a forklift upgrade. And it allows HP itself to upgrade or replace specific technologies in customer installations relatively easily. That, Scott argues, is where HP provides unique value in the marketplace today.

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