Now that flash, the Cloud and other technologies have transformed the storage industry, HP customers want to know how to modernize their architecture with minimal investment. Bill Philbin, VP of HP’s Virtual Development Unit, argues for the Cloud.

“Storage is an exciting place to be right now,” he told theCUBE during HP Discover 2015. “There are trends in the industry that impact everything regardless of whether you use the products. A lot of our customers are unwilling to put their data outside the firewall, but the easy provision, the cost and the fast access to Cloud storage is driving those behaviors inside the firewall. External trends have an impact on converged systems such as what HP offers.”

The effects of storage becoming easier to administer

Philbin believes now that storage is becoming easier to administer, the storage administrator’s role must change. “His job is to define a set of business policies and practices that others get to choose from,” he said.

theCUBE cohost Dave Vallante asked Philbin if storage would now allow users to access metadata from the portfolio to leverage that data in different ways.

“Today, you’ve got a proprietary interface at the point of storage, and you’ve got another proprietary interface at the point of recovery,” Philbin said. “When you have one set of storage, you can better leverage the metadata that’s stored at the point of inception. If you look at the work we’re doing with Autonomy on interrogating data that’s in the backup, we can provide a much richer data stream.”

Watch the full interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of HP Discover Las Vegas 2015.