From Marc Farley’s perspective, a lot of the technology components that make up the storage ecosystem are not built from within. The trick is tying them all together.

“I think the big areas where innovation comes along is integration. I think that most of the technology that comes to storage has been invented somewhere else already,” said Farley, a social media specialist at HP. “Storage just figures out how to apply it.”

For HP, innovation and integration means converged infrastructures.

“At HP the innovation is about taking bits of servers and networking and integrating it together with storage. So the innovation we’ve got there is taking existing pieces and trying to fold it together,” Farley said. “And I think that’s what you’re seeing across the board, with virtualization for instance, with integration of VMware, of Citrix, of these different things and that is the wheel that drives this industry I think.”

Speaking to Wikibon’s Stuart Miniman live inside theCube from the floor of HP Discover 2011 in Las Vegas, Farley gave viewers his take on HP’s converged infrastructure approach.

So the idea is that if somebody buys a solution, they don’t buy a box as a solution. They may buy some blades of this, some blades of that, some amount of this other stuff that goes in a rack,” Farley said. “It’s not converged solution on a palate. It’s a converged solution with parts that you put together but they all assemble into something that would fit on a palate. And to me that’s really intriguing and it’s a little bit different approach.

Farley added: “I like it. It presents a flexibility that I think is unique.”