“It’s a piece of the puzzle, but it’s not the whole puzzle from our perspective,” said Rob Strechay, director of product marketing and management for Hewlett-Packard Co.’s Storage division. Strechay joined Dave Vellante and Stu Miniman of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, to “talk hyperconvergence” during VMworld 2015. At HP Storage, hyperconvergence is seen as an extension of ease of management and ease of deployment. It is embodied by HP’s StoreVirtual storage line.

Strechay said that HP is still relevant in the storage space because, “We’ve had eight years working with our customers on this and getting it right.” He believes that customers still need robust data services and says that although he is the “hyperconvergence guy,” he wants to “make sure it works for the customer rather than force-feeding hyperconverge.”

The workload economy

Strechay added that his customers don’t really care about being hyperconvergent; they just want to know, “Is it supported?” For the customer, he said, “The API economy is the key; it is the workload economy.”

Addressing the “elephant in the room” of HP’s decision to stop selling VMware’s EVO:RAIL, Strechay said that HP is building on its 15-year relationship with VMware and is still active with Virtual SAN (VSAN). “What we’ve seen in the hyperconverge space is that it made more sense for us to focus on our own StoreVirtual,” he said.

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

Photo by SiliconANGLE