Craig Nunes, VP of HP Storage joins John Furrier and Dave Vellante in theCUBE at Discover 2013. The three discuss HP’s use of Flash, leadership in the software defined data center and what Nunes jokes is the real secret to 3PAR’s success.

Vellante suggests HP made its mark on 3PAR and is gaining traction in the market now, so why is Flash not a bolt-on? According to Nunes, what HP has shared at Discover 2013 was not just a three part array with SSDs in it. He explains, “We drive some granularity in the i/o between the controller and the Flash. We can do bytes and reads, 2,000 times smaller. We also have the foresight to take advantage of the HD world.”

Vellante notes 3PAR is only the new entrant into the tier-one space. He adds, “All of a sudden flash comes along and we know these are the new tier ones. And, who knows what happens to that traditional tier one.” Vellante believes the market will decide whether HP’s technology will hold up.

Nunes attributes HPs current success to technologists three years ago that tried to unlock the backend performance of the array. They aimed to aggregate every drive in a thousand drive array through a very clustered approach. Nunes notes that now, “[All] we’re doing is replacing a thousand drives with 50 flash drives. We were lucky, we were good.” He believes competitors have taken a page from HP’s book, given that they have had the architecture to implement this approach.

Nunes notes that HP’s big push is in software-defined storage. Given that HP has been developing software-defined storage and data centers since 2007, they have been doing it since “before it was cool.” Nunes notes that such platforms are great for remote office deployments, especially when completing a local backup.

Nunes also quips, “The real secret to 3PAR success is absolutely killer marketing.” What makes an all flash array appealing is its newness and popularity. Still, it’s noteworthy that this approach started with tier-one high end for the cloud.

Watch the full interview here