The debate about whether cloud is going to become a significant part of the future of computing has almost ended now, said David Scott, HP Storage Senior Vice-President and former CEO of 3PAR, HP’s major storage acquisition in 2010.  “Ten years ago, people weren’t sure whether that transition would ever take place, but now I think people realize…everything’s going to eventually end up with delivery of IT as a service,” Scott said this week at HP Discover in Las Vegas during a visit to theCube (full interview video below).

Customers today are looking for ways to transition their traditional IT environments to cloud, whether it’s private or public, Scott told Wikibon.org’s co-founder David Vellante and SiliconAngle.com founder John Furrier in the Cube. “For most enterprises, it’s going to be baby steps — (for IT vendors) it’s going to be a question of how do you provide customers with the capability of handling this hybrid delivery model they’re going to have,” he commented.

As for hybrid cloud implementations, “some of the more interesting ones are where customers have become sophisticated enough to go to two cloud service providers, and use those two different vendors like dual operating entities, looking to provide disaster recovery between them, and also integrating what remains of their core IT capabilities,” Scott said. “A lot of people are concerned that if I lock myself into a single cloud vendor, how do I ever get out? But if you start off with a couple of them, you always have that alternative, you can shop around for the best deals – a multivendor cloud.”

Scott picked up on one of HP’s major themes at Discover, its open approach to IT stacks and infrastructure in the cloud. “The desire to have a single, homogeneous stack for your cloud solutions is a misplaced view of the way cloud is,” he commented. “Cloud has to reflect the breadth of the application environments that enterprises have today – you have to look at cloud solutions that are open, that can support multiple hypervisors.”

In the industry discussion about best-of-breed technologies vs. integrated stacks, Scott argued that because cloud service providers will be competing on what service level they can deliver at the lowest transactional cost, they have to build their infrastructures based on best-of-breed technologies. At the same time, HP’s converged infrastructure strategy
“is saying we’re open, we understand that at some point…you may want to substitute a technology (in our best-of-breed stack) if we fall behind in an area…that’s very different from other vendors who literally have packaged up their solutions, and it’s got to be exactly their product, even if that means choosing sub-optimized storage or servers.”

On the integration of 3PAR into HP, Scott said that in all three key areas – people, process and products – HP was ahead of plan, and “almost all of our people continued with HP, we had no significant attrition. Out of the gate in our first quarter, we doubled our growth rates, relative to the year-ago quarter when 3PAR was stand-alone, and we accelerated the growth rate into the second quarter. The momentum has been very good.”