The HP-Discover Conference kicks off tomorrow in Frankfurt, Germany and HP has made a number of corresponding storage announcements. Wikibon Co-Founder and CTO, David Floyer, met with Kristin Feledy on the Morning NewsDesk Show to comment on HP’s latest innovations. Floyer predicted that software-led infrastructure will take over data centers in the next five years. Floyer took a moment to explain the term “software-led,” as Wikibon has recently published research on software-led infrastructure and software-led storage. The traditional infrastructure has been built around components, such as servers, storage and networking, and all of the added value of software has been within those components. The idea of software-led infrastructure is, instead of software being within components themselves, they’re provided as services across the whole infrastructure or data center.

HP’s latest announcements are running in tandem with the “software-led” concept. One announcement is that their product StoreOnce, which has great algorithms to deduplicate data, is now providing the same algorithms on smaller models, as well as providing the same deduplication function on servers themselves. Floyer said, “It’s a good example of a software-led service that they’re building towards. It’s in its infancy at the moment, but it’s obviously the right direction.”

HP has also announced new 3PAR models, among them a flash-only array. With software-led storage, Floyer said that most active data will be on NAN flash. However, Floyer believes this new model is not quite everything it should be yet, as it’s still using the SSDs. He feels they will improve this over time, and that it’s still a good start for providing flash-only storage.

One other announcement was around another HP product, StoreAll, which is a way of having object files and filing systems and being able to define and keep the metadata related to those files and objects in a single place and be able to query those very rapidly. He used the example of extracting and loading data to an analytics tool, such as Autonomy, to show how beneficial this would be. He said tests that HP have done showed that it was 40 times faster to load Autonomy from StoreAll than from the previous system.  See the entire segment with Kristin Feledy and David Floyer on the Morning NewsDesk Show.