There are many storage options available today, their configurations ranging from public to hybrid cloud. Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co. is making an all-flash data center possible with affordable and secure storage for any size company, according to Bill Philbin, senior VP, GM Storage Business Unit, at HPE.

At the HPE Discover EU conference in London, Dave Vellante (@dvellante) and Paul Gillin (@pgillin), co-hosts of theCUBE*, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, spoke with Philbin and Orjan Torsteinsen, CTO and head of IT systems management at Funn AS, about the partnership between the two companies.

Funn is a service provider serving parts of Norway. Originally an IBM partner, the company moved to HPE to make the move from a CapEx to OpEx business model. “The world is changing, and the world is changing quite rapidly, and we also need strong partners,” said Torsteinsen, who chose HPE for storage and server solutions.

The provider is happy with the HPE OpEx model because it allows them to focus on their customers while HPE takes care of installments and upgrades for both server and storage. Funn also relies on HPE for capacity planning.

“It’s compute and storage on demand, as their business dictates. We deliver the services capability internally,” Philbin stated.

According to Philbin, it is possible to get all-flash storage for three cents per usable gigabyte. “From innovation to industrialization, it has always been standard economics,” explained Philbin. He continued to point out that this model is half the cost of a conventional cloud-oriented storage service.

All flash sitting in the data center also poses no sovereignty issues for a company like Funn. Located in Norway, the provider has many restrictions about where the data resides. It also offers flexible capacity within the customer’s data center. HPE works with customers to understand how the business is scaling and provisions compute capacity accordingly. Storage capacity is different, because you need it to “stick” to get the full use of your data through analytics.

The crossroads of can and cannot

Market demands for the OpEx model is growing for those customers who have scale, size and complexity. Philbin revealed that companies such as Netflix and DropBox recently moved to the all-flash model to take advantage of the performance.

“Flash is going mainstream,” Philbin announced. Flash is no longer the boutique, high-performance and expensive option it once, was and HPE is now at the crossroads of selling more flash than spinning capacity.

Larger HPE customers are not willing to make the tradeoff between availability and the cost of all-flash. Due to the lower economics, customers don’t have to decide what is on flash and what is spinning.

“It is just a matter of time before the economics change and all-flash becomes affordable over spinning disk,” stated Philbin.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of HPE Discover EU. (*Disclosure: HPE and other companies sponsor some HPE Discover EU segments on SiliconANGLE Media’s theCUBE. Neither HPE nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo by SiliconANGLE