With their extra time, IT managers can study new applications that business units want to deploy in the data center, to make sure they're deployed the best way possible, he said.

Telecommunications is one industry that's likely to embrace this approach, as carriers seek to quickly roll out new types of profitable services to make up for flagging wireline revenues, Selway said. But businesses across the board have rapidly growing storage needs, with none seeing less than 20 percent data growth over the past year and some seeing as much as 400 percent, according to HP.

The company's earlier this year of storage software vendor Ibrix plays a key role in its strategy. Among other things, Ibrix can allocate different parts of an infrastructure to file storage, block storage, virtual tape and other functions, and change that allocation as required. Its capabilities are at the center of the X9000 series of storage platforms, announced last month.

To realize HP's vision today, various components such as HP's BladeSystem storage platforms, high-density storage, Ibrix and other components need to be manually combined in most cases, Selway said. For enterprises with petabytes of data to store, the company's X9720 platform can already be used as a unified system, thanks to some tuning by HP for specific industries such as entertainment, he said. The company plans to work with independent software vendors to make the single-system platform a reality for more types of organizations, Selway said.