It’s been five years since Hewlett-Packard Co. acquired 3PAR, Inc., and a lot has changed since then. Milan Shetti, chief technical officer of HP Storage, spoke to theCUBE’s Dave Vellante and Jeff Frick during HP Discover 2015 and recounted the journey of making 3PAR flash-capable.

Starting with their first impression concerning the storage and servers, Shetti said, “We just loved it.” What made 3PAR unique was the “separation of concerns in the core software architecture” and the “market was going to with the 3PAR operating system.”

Today, 3PAR is ready for flash.

When Vellante asked how HP knew that 3PAR was compatible with flash, Shetti recalled, “The way the operating system was structured was a very strong storage operating system,” mainly because of the architecture components — optimization and efficiency was built in to the OS and lantency/algorithims built in that “today would be called ‘machine learning’ and ‘Big Data’ inherent in the core architecture.”

The five-year transition

The five-year transition began with the “Year of Despair” when Shetti reported that customers wanted HP to do something with storage, but no immediate solution appeared. Next came, Year Two, a time of “hope” within Research and Development, which accelerated due to “adding people and testing,” but “most importantly the customers.”

The perfect storm of circumstances led to Year Three, or as Shetti remarked, The Year of Optimism, when a “checkered relationship with acquisition” led to a “don’t screw it up” sentiment among customers. Next came the introduction of flash to 3PAR, “the Year of Excitement,” which culminated in Year Five: “The Year of The High Five.”

Vellante called the all-flash data center a “true organic development” in Research and Development within HP.”

Although “less than 2-3% of customers really made the transition from disc to flash,” during the interview, Shetti predicted a great change in that statistic in the next few years. Shetti cited the sales trend “more flash than 15k RPM drives” in the last two quarters as evidence to this claim.

When it comes to David Floyer’s predictions that flash will be less expensive than spinning disc by next year, Shetti said that Floyer’s predictions are so accurate that next Discover he will be bringing him to the Blackjack table.

Watch the full interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of HP Discover Las Vegas 2015.