HP’s new storage announcements are “all about polymorphic simplicity, available in many shapes and sizes to solve customer problems,” says Craig Nunes, VP of Storage at HP.

“We have customers who deal with 10, 15, even 20 architectures just to get the storage done for their business,” he told Wikibon CEO David Vellante and SiliconAngle CEO John Furrier in the Cube at HP Discover 2012 in Frankfurt Germany, December 5, 2012. That is a tremendous drag on their ability to move forward into storage virtualization, SSD architectures, and Big Data.

HP is simplifying their lives by focusing on one storage architecture based on 3PAR StoreServ for all storage in most customer houses. Of course, he says, HP has many clients out there who are still on multiple older architectures, and it is not going to abandon them.

On the other extreme it has clients who are already using Software-Defined Storage and want to avoid lock in to any one hardware vendor. For them HP has StoreVirtual. “We have found that the hardware has caught up with the needs of virtualized systems. The horsepower on today’s servers is huge, and we find that it’s not all being used. We have seen people save 50% to 60% of their power, cooling, and floor space and 70% to 80% of their storage costs by moving to StoreVirtual.”

However, for those existing customers who are ready to move forward on a hardware platform and for new customers, it will sell one storage architecture for all needs, 3PSAR StoreServ. It has already announced a future total SSD version StoreServ. “This is a modern architecture that is ready for the future,” he said.