“You guys are the biggest player and probably the largest share in storage that we’ve ever seen,” said Stu Miniman as he welcomed Travis Vigil, executive director of product management for Dell Storage, to theCUBE, from theSiliconANGLE Media team, during Dell World 2015 in Austin, Texas.

“I feel really good at where we’re at,” Vigil responded. “I think the future just gets brighter as you go forward.”

With the goal of providing value to its customer base, Dell, Inc. set out on a journey to create a single architecture, and to get ahead of the curve in flash storage. Today, according to Virgil, “we have simplified the portfolio, but at the same time provided a path forward that allows the customer to realize a long-term ROI when investing in Dell storage.”

Customers don’t buy storage

What do Dell’s customers’ think of storage? According to Vigil, customers don’t really buy storage, but rather do new deployments and purchase new apps that happen to use storage. They ask, “How does this infrastructure support my workload?” he said.

Virgil sees two trends in storage: first, the new software-defined, hyper-converged architecture, such as Dell’s SC Series. And, second, the current architecture, which is best of breed, server storage and networking. Virgil sees both coexisting into the future, saying that it is not an “either or” but a “both and;” it’ll be a “both and” for many years to come.”

New storage announcements

Dell’s new storage offerings support both these trends, with the SC9000 for data centers and supporting Storage Center 6.7 array software offering active data compression and lowest cost per gig for flash, according to Vigil. “We will continue to innovate, support and enhance on both sides of that equation,” he added.

Flash growth of flash

Dell has been on the forefront of the rapid transition to flash storage. Virgil told theCUBE hosts that he has seen an 80 percent growth rate in last year, with flash now as expensive or less than 15K drives. “I anticipate that 15K drives are going the way of the Dodo drive,” he said.

Watch the full interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of Dell World 2015. And join in on the conversation by CrowdChatting with theCUBE hosts during Dell World 2015.

Photo by SiliconANGLE