Trey Layton, VCE CTO, discussed converged infrastructure, scale-out trends and software-defined software with theCube co-hosts Dave Vellante and Stu Miniman live at the 2013 edition of EMC World.

Layton said he had been getting a lot of feedback from both existing customers and potential customers that are testing VCE solutions against the company’s competition, and they were excited about the way VCE could change the way they were doing business. He mentioned there were a lot of conversations going on around Vblock, ViPR, scale-out technology, and other innovations of VCE investor companies.

Vellante asked about Vblock and how it plays out with the significant market disruption created by flash. “Flash everywhere is the answer,” Layton said. VCE has had flash in the array for quite some time. The company focuses on enabling current customers to deploy all flash arrays. “We will allow our customers to consume the technology where it best serves them,” rather than having a rigid flash strategy.

“As XtremIO gets to the point of full release, you will see multiple approaches to our solution in that space,” Layton said, and it will include Isilon. Building VBlock solutions around Isilon and XtremIO will be part of the company’s development strategy.

Commenting on OpenStack and software-defined storage, Layton said that “software-defined everything is coming to a data center near you. “We very much want to promote and enable our customers the SD technology of our investor companies.” Customers will be able to consume these technologies in the VBlock system architecture.

“Laarge organizations (Amazon, Google) are building cloud-scale, web-scale architectures, which change the data center of the future,” he added. Taking the massive amounts of data available and putting it into an enterprise is a challenge VCE is quite interested in.

Commenting ont he multi-vendor approach, Layton said it strengthen’s VCE. The investor companies also invest in OpenStack. He added that Pivotal’s openness enables VCE to deliver fast data, infrastructure analytics in the context of customers who have fast data, real time analytics application environments.

As far as future VCE plans are concerned, Layton shared, “I am most excited about where we are going with cloud-scale, web-scale storage infrastructures” and how flash plays into it.  See Layton’s entire segment below.