Craig Nunes, the vice president of marketing at HP Storage, hopped into theCube during the recently concluded VMworld conference to discuss software-defined infrastructure, virtualization and everything in between.

Nunes starts the interview by providing his take on software-defined storage (SDS,) which he describes as the separation of storage management from the hypervisor and the underlying hardware. Abstracting the latter layer enables users to realize a wide range of benefits, he notes, including simplified administration and high availability.

According to Nunes, the primary applications of SDS are driving down storage costs and improving quality of service. He adds that the main driver behind the accelerating adoption of this methodology is the exponential increase in available compute and capacity resources, which together with virtualization form a “perfect storm” that puts organizations on a path to cost-effective shared storage.

Asked to share HP’s stance on VMware’s push into the SDS space, Nunes says that the virtualization giant is only targeting flash-enhanced arrays, which account for a tiny fraction of overall storage system shipments. Hewlett Packard has a much broader strategy that spans the entire market, and its value proposition includes a more mature services portfolio.

The executive mentions that storage-defined storage is ideal for small sites such as branch offices before shifting his focus to 3PAR, which recorded a 300 percent sales increase since last year. He credits this massive growth to the high level of abstraction that the storage provider offers with its solutions, which provide a “different experience” by combining simplicity with high-end features such as non disruptive data migration, multi-tenancy and replication federation.

Nunes wraps up the discussion by providing a glimpse into HP’s plans for the software-defined data center. Click the video below for more on that.