In another interview on SiliconANGLE’s theCube, Wikibon’s David Floyer and Dave Vellante sat down with Dale Degen, the senior marketing manager for HP Storage. They discussed his long tenure in the storage field and how HP’s acquisition of LeftHand has shown their dedication toward nudging the market to software led storage solutions.

Degen started out by stating the goal over his 10 years specifically in software defined storage was to create and provide SDS and data services that would benefit end users not only in performance but also on the budget’s bottomline.

HP’s offering, like many in the field, was rebranded a little under two years ago. Their product, StoreVirtual, makes porting of information much easier, not only on current storage infrastructures but also across VMs. StoreVirtual is slowly being implemented across much of the HP line of products.

And Degen’s original stated goal of ultimately lowering cost of implementation is a goal he and HP are still working on. As they move forward they are able to take the same architecture of a traditional array and implement it in the virtual. This functionality has been instrumental in the price of solid state shooting downward.

When one considers SDS, you realize it is comprised of two distinct aspects. Both storage and data services fall under this umbrella. Where HP StoreVirtual thrives is in that they can package their product to include both of these aspects.

Much like VMWare’s President and COO Ken Grohe acknowledged, HP also has an intellectual and budgeted commitment to the evolution of OpenStack. As Degen stated, “It’s a vital part of our strategy.” He went on to comment HP StoreVirtual is also building an overarching management of the entire portfolio. With just one piece of software, the entire spectrum of storage, data services, dedupe, etc., would be covered.

Before concluding the interview, Degen announced HP Storage’s new LeftHand 11.0, into which has been added adaptive optimization. This allows for going into the virtual environment and provisioning storage along with the ability to adapt it as well.