Taking advantage of its HP Discover event in Frankfurt, Germany earlier this month, HP announced the expansion of its Converged Storage architecture built on 2010’s acquisition of 3PAR, and a filing system dedicated to Big Data.

Chuck Smith, VP of BladeSystem and Business Planning, HP, talked to SiliconAngle’s Founder John Furrier and Wikibon’s Chief Analysts, Dave Vellente, on the importance of software-led storage and software-led infrastructure and how storage software helps you reduce costs, simplify storage infrastructure, protect vital assets and respond faster to business opportunities (full video below).

It’s a pertinent topic across the industry, and a tactical development for HP in particular. Providing keen analysis on the subject is Wikibon Co-Founder and CTO, David Floyer, who recently published research on software-led infrastructure and software-led storage and how HP is focusing on the storage elements and moving towards software-led storage in management of unstructured and semi-structured Big Data.

Smith said HP has been shipping cloud systems for three years, and their cloud system actually allows HP to deliver on cloud-based architecture for infrastructure services, all the way to the applications. HP is leveraging the compute storage and networking resources and bringing that together with Cloud Map and delivering that applications.

He added that their software solution reduces operational costs and enables hardware-specific configurations, performance tuning and connectivity management. The HP Cloud Maps integrated solution is extending HP’s open source methodologies, providing prepackaged templates that make up an application service catalog ready for immediate deployment with one click. With HP CloudSystem and HP Cloud Maps, the time to create new cloud services that support corporate applications can be reduced drastically.

When it comes to running big data applications, Smith said HP’s ProLiant SL4500 server is denser and more profitable than traditional servers when users can run applications in distributed environments, combining processing units, network and storage. The server as part of the Converged Infrastructure offerings combines hardware and software for the cloud, virtualization, database and other applications.

He added that the software-led ProLiant SL4500 server is customizable enough to scale as per the requirements of the enterprise, unlike competitors’ products from Oracle, Cisco, and IBM, and is compatible with Hadoop and MongoDB-distributed environments.

HP wanted to offer its customers a much more flexible configuration that enables the highly integrated server offerings demanded in the enterprise environment these days. It’s a major shift for HP as it diversifies a waning consumer market, with a strong desire to lead the software-led storage market without overloading the storage, but to balance the flow when it comes to dealing with the problems of HDD or SDD.