When Hewlett-Packard Co. unveiled its first purpose-built flash array last June, its pitch consisted of a mature management stack and not much else. Just over a year later, the company boasts one of the  most well-rounded offerings in the high-end of the market that is at least as competitive on the hardware side as it is in the software department. And with the recent introduction of the $35,000 StoreServ 7200 Starter Kit, that value proposition now extends all the way down to the bottom of the strategic entry-level bracket.

Vish Mulchand, the mastermind behind the breakneck transformation of HP’s storage strategy, returned to theCUBE at VMworld 2014 on the occasion of the launch to share his insider’s account of how the lumbering enterprise giant caught up with an industry led by fast-moving startups in a matter of just a few quarters.  The first bump on the road to flash supremacy mapping out customer requirements and the relevant technology trends to the market, a task he made clear wasn’t much of an obstacle for his and team.

Software-defined smarts

Mulchand sees the modern storage landscape as divided into two distinct product categories. One is the software-defined variety, solutions designed to pool large amounts of commodity hardware into a logical whole that can be managed with no regard to the messy details of the underlying infrastructure. HP competes in that space  with so-called “virtual appliances” based on its best-selling StoreVirtual and StoreOnce offerings, which make the advanced capabilities of the physical systems available for lower-cost x86 machines that don’t come with any bells and whistles built-in.

That includes the company’s own boxes as well as competing products from the likes of Dell Inc., Mulchand highlighted, a stark departure from the lock-in mentality of the incumbent crowd that  underscores HP’s attempt at addressing the growing demand for  freedom of choice among customers. In that spirit, the vendor recently added support for the KVM virtualization component of Linux to StoreVirtual VSA and made StoreOnce VSA compatible with Microsoft Corp.’s  Hyper-V hypervisor.

Besides offering CIOs more choice, the upgrades also serve to counter VMware Inc.’s entry into the software-defined storage space, a move that Mulchand dismissed as a threat to his company. “The introduction of vSAN and EVO:RAIL continues to point to and validate this notion of software-defined storage. In my mind, software-defined and flash are the two key disrupts. Going to next year, we’ll see that going even more mainstream.”

Hardware performance

Flash memory constitutes the core of what Mulchand refers to as “performance-optimized storage”, which he perceives as the other major segment of the competitive landscape. In that arena, Hewlett-Packard offers the 3PAR 7450, which can handle over 900,000 input/output operations per second with less less than 0.7 milliseconds of delay for two dollars per gigabyte, an industry low.

According to Mulchand, the platform achieves that combination with a set of homegrown optimizations that were almost all rolled out in the relatively short period since HP entered the market. Included in the bundle is an  ultra ultra-efficient capacity optimization technique dubbed  Thin Deduplication and Adaptive Sparing, a feature that taps into the normally inaccessible memory drive manufacturers add to their products for fault tolerance purposes  in order to increase the amount of available capacity.

“We took an 800Gb SSD and look at how provisioning is done and said, ‘wait a minute, we can be more intelligent than this’. Adaptive Sparing allows you to reduce the overall provisioning capacity of the drive, so the net effect is that customers get extra capacity for the same price because we treated the flash differently than traditional media,” Mulchand explained.

The technology is already being put to good use. Mulchand detailed that a cloud service provider called Latisys Inc. is leveraging the 3PAR 7450 to power its top hosting tier, while the firm behind the popular Dragon Dictation service for iOS stores speech patterns on it. He added that marketing analytics giant ExactTarget Inc. has also deployed several of the arrays to support its massive database environment, which has over two trillion rows and sees about  25 billion added  every single day.