Another revolution in storage — that is how David Scott see’s Hewlett-Packard’s recently announced all-flash 7450 array. The SVP & General Manager of HP Storage met in a live interview with theCUBE co-hosts John Furrier and Dave Vellante at HP Discover this week. Regarding flash in the storage market, Scott explained “the question on everybody’s mind is when will the tipping point occur.” That tipping point was all-flash arrays for mainstream enterprise application usage, which the new announcement just delivered.

3 things need to happen for flash to go mainstream

“If you look at the all-flash market, three things need to happen for it to replace mainstream  storage systems. It requires a predictable response time. It then needs to become affordable. The reason flash has not taken off, it’s too expensive,” Scott stated.

“We can now support a price point that is less than $2 per usable gigabyte,” which makes it more inexpensive to choose a flash array than a spinning disk one, he explained.

The third thing that needs to happen for flash to replace mainstream storage systems is is to make it enterprise compatible and resilient. To make people feel safe about going with all-flash arrays, HP has launched a new five year guarantee. The company also guarantees that with a quad core configuration, customers have a 99.9999 percent availability.

• More on HP’s flash storage

Given, the tsunami of an unstructured data in the market, Furrier asked if there was a need for a one trick pony for flash, or a need for a breadth of use cases. Scott said if you look at the niche applications that all-flash was going after initially, they need low latency. HP then went for other general apps. If you want to be in the massive, multi purpose space, you need a solution that works in several scenarios, he explains.

Asked to comment on the warranty issues around flash, Scott said that HP had more than four years of experience with flash storage. “Because we have very sophisticated remote support systems, we can actually understand what happens to the flash drives. Even on the consumer MLC drives, we are able to deliver five year warranty” and make sure people can deploy all-flash and keep their data safe.

“If you look at some of the flash storage startups right now, they really don’t have the enterprise scale or resilience.”  None have been able to break the $2 per gigabyte price point, and their infrastructure is not as reliable, providing worse solutions for a higher cost. “That is not a value prop I’d want to take to investors.” Scott boasted.

HP responds to EMC’s latest storage buy

Commenting on storage rival EMC’s acquisition of XtremIO, “we bought the best architecture out there,” Scott said that XtremIO had remarkable small storage, and had none of the scale or resilience built in. “I was surprised about the acquisition.”

“To deploy applications, if it’s not on 3PAR, it’s another large competitor,” Scott said, comparing the HP storage product to EMC’s. “If you use at the [ EMC] VMAX and the cost, you’re going to pay four times as much for a VMAX, it will take 20 times more space, and it will take eight times more power.” According to Scott, 3PAR is a better option for anyone reconsidering their VMAX architecture.