The software-defined data center is usually thought of in terms of its components, but Hewlett-Packard Co. is focusing on the big picture, according to the head of worldwide marketing for its key converged infrastructure business. Paul Miller returned to SiliconANGLE’s theCUBE at the hardware titan’s recent customer event in Barcelona to share how that approach is benefiting customers with hosts John Furrier and Dave Vellante.

One of the main requirements fueling the industry’s interest in the notion of programmable hardware is the need for freedom of choice. HP’s approach is to allow customers to change up the individual building blocks as needed depending on their requirements, Miller said.

Facilitating that configurability is what he described as a modular architecture that makes it possible to customize servers, storage and networking independently of each other while still maintaining integration of the whole. Miller said that this enables organizations to support multiple workloads in the same chassis, which allows for standardization that eliminates the hassle involved in managing specialized appliances for each application.

That’s a major benefit that can save practitioners a lot of time at scale, but it’s also what every other converged infrastructure vendor is promising. Where HP attempts to set itself apart is one level up in the software layer. “Convergence started with people thinking it’s all about the hardware, but the real end-game of convergence is how to use software-defined infrastructure management to provide that value of simplicity and automation,” Miller told Furrier and Vellante.

Balancing that with the need to provide freedom of choice required HP to adopt an inclusive strategy that brings the different components under a unified management layer that doesn’t distinguish between homegrown and third-party products. Filling that role is the company’s newly updated OneView platform, which Miller said serves as an automation hub that “all other pieces plug into, whether it’s third party software or software-defined elements like storage and networking.”

He cited a major retailer that is implementing the software to double its store count without hiring more IT practitioners to maintain the extra hardware in the new branches. That have been unheard of a few years ago, Miller said. Meanwhile, other companies are turning to the vendor for help modernizing their existing infrastructure, particularly mission-critical business intelligence deployments that have to remain available at all times.

That 24 X 7 requirement can make upgrades almost impractical, a limitation that Miller said HP is helping customers circumvent with its high-availability Integrity servers. The machines are specifically designed for running sensitive enterprise workloads, a pitch that HP gave for the new Superdome X model which was introduced at the conference alongside the latest version of OneView.

The change of processor architectures underscores HP’s broader effort to fit the currently disparate pieces of the software-defined data center puzzle together, a formidable challenge it’s tackling one new product and update at a time. “We’re trying not to have a future where silos of servers, storage, networking are replaced by new silos of convergence,” Miller said.

Watch the full interview (21:59)