HP Discover 2012 was highlighted by some major game-changing announcements from HP. At SiliconAngle, we always dig deeper to get insight directly from the sources, so John Furrier and Dave Vellante sat down with HP Storage’s vice president of Marketing Tom Joyce to talk about HP’s innovations in unstructured data storage.

HP has been in the process of revamping its storage offerings over the past 2 1/2 years, Joyce explained. The company decided that it was time for a new approach and time for HP to introduce new technology and products that would better suit customer needs. That process began with its acquisition of 3PAR and culminated with HP’s announcement at HP Discover 2012 this week.

3PAR had made excellent strides in the large enterprise area, but HP wanted to expand its offerings down into the mid-range market. That expansion came in the form of HP/3PAR’s StoreServe, which will start at $25,000 and introduce high-end storage into the midmarket arena for the first time.

Another major innovation Joyce highlighted was StoreAll, which will cover the unstructured data space in general, including big data, archiving, business analytics, sharing, and more. StoreAll will combine multiple software-based products: filesystem technology, metadata, object storage, and cloud-based services.

Dave Vellante then asked Mr. Joyce about object storage and why it might be something businesses should strongly consider. Joyce replied that businesses are in need of something beyond the classic NAS model. Object storage presents a much more approachable format for developing storage platforms. Many of us have used it in the consumer space with Google Drive, Box.net, Dropbox, and other cloud-based storage services. Now, HP is moving that storage concept into the enterprise, bringing an unprecedented level of simplicity into the data center.

Finally, Joyce talked a little about StoreVirtual, HP’s software defined data center offering that will make it easier for companies to plug in a storage system into whatever type of hardware, OS, etc. they happen to be running. Rather than being a standalone appliance, StoreVirtual will work with whatever type of general server a company might be using and even within their current virtualization.

At the end of the interview Vellante asked Joyce to elucidate the recent advancements in Flash technology and how solid state storage is changing the enterprise storage market. Joyce answered that and more in the full interview, which you can watch right here.