3PAR has leveraged HP’s sales channel to grow 60%+ per quarter since its acquisition says HP SVP and General Manager of Storage and former 3PAR CEO David Scott on SiliconAngle.tv. And the reverse is also true – 3PAR is becoming a central growth driver for HP in storage for virtualized environments, complimenting its 42% market share in servers. And StoreOnce, HP’s internally developed system for data deduplication and backup, is growing at a 30% CAGR.

“3PAR is now our biggest storage line,” the visibly proud Scott, who originally left HP to found 3PAR and then sold it, and himself, back to the vendor, told Wikibon’s David Vellante and SiliconAngle’s John Furrier in an interview webcast live from the Cube on the floor of VMworld 2012. “3PAR is offering tremendous performance advantages, allowing users to double the number of VMs they can run.” And LeftHand, another HP acquisition, is showing strong growth in the SMB market.

This is taking HP into the next generation of computing, he said. “Twenty years ago storage was widely see as a peripheral for the server world.” Today the advent of IT-as-a-Service both in the public and private clouds, the explosion of unstructured information, and the demand for hardware-agnostic virtual storage appliances, are putting storage at the center of the new Data Infrastructure.

Where HP really leads, he argues, is in policy-based computing and in particular autonomic management, “where the system is so well instrumented that it can determine its own policies for determining optimal storage.”

He predicts continued development of policy-based optimization of storage tiering and other aspects of storage management where more opportunities exist for improved performance and simplified management. The goal is to automate management across all three major hardware components of the IT infrastructure – storage, server and network– which is his definition of the software-driven data center.

Non-volatile Memory & SSDs

Scott predicts that while solid-state non-volatile memory in general will continue to transform the storage market, that non-volatile memory may not be limited to or even remain primarily NAND flash. Several other technologies are appearing in the market to vie for a place in the next generation of storage. Each of these has differences in how it handles data that will require changes in the architectures of the new all-flash startups as well as the traditional storage vendors.

“We believe that with StoreOne we are well positioned to evolve to take full advantage of non-volatile memory, including these newer technologies,” he said. The recent purchases by EMC and IBM in the flash storage area imply that they are not as sanguine about their existing architectures, he added.

The Future of the HP-VMware Partnership

He remains confident that HP’s partnership with VMware will continue into the future despite EMC’s ownership and the announcement that EMC executive Pat Gelsinger is taking over as VMware CEO.

“VMware has managed to create valuable properties across the IT spectrum by maintaining a level playing field,” he said. “It is in VMware’s best interest to maintain that level playing field, and every evidence is that it will continue to do that. We will continue to partner with them.”

Virtual Arrays and Multiple Hypervisor Environments

He predicts that the next step in storage will be the creation of virtual storage appliances, “storage arrays without the array,” consisting of a variety of rich services built on industry-standard architectures that are storage hardware and hypervisor agnostic. HP, he says, is already doing that. “Our new appliances work on both VMware and [Microsoft] Hyper-V, and furthermore they can do that simultaneously in heterogeneous environments.”

This, he says, is important because the trend is toward multiple-hypervisor environments. For instance, Wikibon’s own recently released survey of VMware users
shows that a high percentage have at least one other hypervisor in house, either in test or production. Scott predicts that within 18-24 months, 80% of IT shops will have multiple hypervisors running, and the storage that will be central to those data-driven environments needs to run seamlessly over those hypervisors.

“With our LeftHand heritage, we intend to be the leader in providing the abstraction layer in storage that can best support those multiple-hypervisor environments,” he said.