Unifying existing infrastructure silos under a single point of control is the prevalent strategy for realizing the promise of the software-defined data center, but HP storage boss David Scott believes that isn’t enough. In his latest appearance on theCUBE, the veteran executive told hosts John Furrier and Dave Vellante that building the enterprise environments of the future must start from the ground up.

“We don’t believe that hiding complexity is the same as delivering simplicity,” Scott said. “We believe that the only way to deliver a consistent and a coherent data center architecture that is efficient is not just to have a software-managed layer as a control plane but also to create simplicity underneath the covers, eliminating these fragmented silos.”

To this end, HP is working to create a common foundation across the different parts of the storage stack that can spare administrators the complexity of juggling multiple management interfaces and integration points. The strategy contrasts with that of its main rivals, EMC and NetApp, Inc., which Scott said have fragmented portfolios along the lines of functional divisions and acquisitions.

The main pillar of HP’s vision is 3PAR, the array maker that Scott sold to the company in 2010 for $2.35 billion. The unit is focused on mission-critical workloads and doubles as HP’s ticket into the new world of flash storage.

Although it was created long before the technology entered the enterprise discussion, the 3PAR operating system is well-suited to take advantage of solid-state memory, at least compared to some of the other architectures that hit the market in the hard drive era, Scott said. That’s the result of the original designers using workload as their focal point instead of the underlying medium.

“If you build a storage I/O architecture that achieves those objects, fundamentally, it doesn’t matter what the backing store capacity is,” he said. “And that’s why we been able to move from disk drives to flash.” The acquisition of 3PAR helped HP kill two birds with one stone: It spared it from having to buy a pure-play vendor with an SSD-optimized stack and opened up a new competitive front.

As flash eats away at the sales of the high-performance disk arrays, Scott said the technology is now trickling down to mid-market appliances. HP’s 3PAR 7000 series puts it in a position to attack the competition on two fronts.

“If you look back at what happened over the last couple of years, you’ve seen the high-end storage market collapse into the mid-range,” Scott said. “That change is going to continue for some time and we’re the only major vendor to grow our market share in the combination of the mid- and high-range segments over the last three quarters.”