In their ongoing coverage of IBM Edge, Dave Vellante and Stu Miniman speak with Eva Helena of Sanbolic. The three discuss Sanbolic’s data product suite,  software defined data centers and the evolution of storage stacks for the software defined world.

Helena explains that Sanbolic’s data product suite creates one pool of the storage that can be accessed from various locations on premise in one location. She adds that Sanbolic uses its “file system technology to get high availability across sites, which creates a more flexible backend and agile infrastructure.” One of the most important things for Sanbolic is the ability to scale out. It is not yet possible to scale out seamlessly, but one can scale out up to 2, 480 nodes in a cluster.

Vellante asks how automated the technology is in terms of making changes and dealing with hotspots. Helena suggests it is very intuitive. She notes, “There’s no training courses that you need to go for multiple days to use these processes. You are talking about the quality of service, which is something that you can tweak. Not an extra management layer, this is something that goes in as a piece of the infrastructure.“

Vellante jokes Sanbolic must have loved it when VMware came out with the software defined data center with NetApp and SDS., you must have thought this is great. Helena responds, “it is funny how the market is coming to us.” She goes on to say that Sanbolic continues to be ahead of its time. Equating it to the fashion world, she notes being avante garde does not really “pay off” (at least financially) until the majority catches on. According to Helena, “Software defined is still al lot of talk, but we can actually do that today and we are. The platform that we have developed is extremely solid.“

Helena suggests the best customer experience is usually associated with companies that bring storage experts to the table from the very beginning. This approach is different from the usual scenario in which, application managers lead and storage managers consult at the end. Organizations, however, are becoming less siloed. Helena sees that “Now all of a sudden we get to talk to everybody at all the different layers of the infrastructure.”

Vellante notes that it took a decade for Sanbolic to develop its software and asks how long will it take to build out that type of storage stack for the software defined world? Helena says the increase will be gradual noting that Sanbolic has a more of a wholistic view of the whole data center. She adds, “not everything is going to happen at once and we’re never going to be done.”