Every tech business needs storage to handle the vast amounts of data brought about by the digital revolution, but the old solutions aren’t always the best choice in today’s ever-changing environment. New technologies have opened the possibilities for storage, and created a great deal of opportunity in a market once dominated by a few industry giants.

To bring these developments into perspective, John Furrier and Dave Vellante of theCUBE, from the SilconANGLE Media team, talked with Andy Warfield, CTO and founder of Coho Data, Inc., at the VMworld 2015 conference.

The discussion opened up with Warfield explaining how enterprise-level storage has seen a great change in recent times. Now that it’s possible to build relatively cheap storage solutions that are also easy to use, smaller players have entered the market. Startups have become relevant in the space, and many young companies have turned to these new solution providers instead of the established giants.

Seeking scalable solutions

One reason why companies would consider a startup instead of an industry player for their storage solution is that these smaller providers can offer bite-sized systems that allow the customer to buy exactly what they need for the moment. The customer can then scale up the system as they grow.

Another reason is that these startup solution providers tend to favor a mix and match approach, using what technology is best for the customer’s current infrastructure. The storage provider can create a scalable, push-button storage solution that uses analytics to figure out what the customer’s workload requires.

Pieces of the hybrid Cloud

Working with these new technologies also means designing for the Cloud. However, Warfield doesn’t see it as a hybrid Cloud approach. Instead, the Cloud becomes another tool on the shelf, one to use when it makes sense for storage products to take advantage of the public Cloud. The real future, he said, is one where people don’t worry about public or private Clouds, they just buy computing power as fits their needs.

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

Photo by SiliconANGLE