The future of software-designed storage is upon us. And during an interview at VMworld 2015, Stu Miniman, cohost of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, talked with Christos Karamanolis, CTO and principal engineer of storage and availability at VMware, Inc.

Find out more about his role at VMware and where the technology is going, plus how VMware approaches its role in the industry.

Driving the industry forward

“We made an explicit decision that we need to drive the narration, we need to drive the industry in the direction we believe is the best direction for our customers, current and future,” said Karamanolis.

This mindset has brought the company through its storage decisions starting in 2009 with an application focus. Plus, it gathered information from customers in order to create new products and features. The VSAN (software-defined shared storage) vision was created to meet the requirements of customers so that customers could manage their storage as simply as they manage their other resources, according to Karamanolis.

Karamanolis touched on the technology and product integrations VMware has chosen in order to offer customers the best solution for their needs. It has focused on making things natural instead of requiring special approaches, training and placing hurdles in front of users. This means the company is also leveraging what it is offering in products as it creates ways for products and technologies to work together.

Karamanolis explained that is the whole point: “We are trying to hide the complexities … and help them [customers] in a way that is automated.”

Find out more about what VMware Storage is up to, what it’s releasing and what its approach is to storage with the complete interview below. And be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of VMworld 2015.

Photo by SiliconANGLE