The be-all and end-all product or service that does everything at the click of a button seems to be the Holy Grail for enterprises these days. “Converged” is a hot term; “hyper-converged” is hotter. Did someone say, “Turnkey?” Well, there are some folks in the industry who have bad news for instant gratification seekers: One-size-fits-all isn’t a good look on most.

Eric Herzog, VP of product marketing at IBM, said that workloads, applications and use cases vary dramatically, so they don’t all fit into the same box. He spoke to John Furrier (@furrier) and John Walls (@JohnWalls21), cohosts of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, during VMworld 2016. “Anyone who comes in here and sits in front of you guys and says, ‘My array or my software will do everything for you,’ is smoking something that’s not legal,” he said.

Herzog added that IBM offers such a broad range of products because its understand how widely everyone’s infrastructure needs vary.

Storage center stage

Of all the parts that need to be carefully considered in building excellent infrastructure for your cloud to run on, Herzog said storage is number one — the foundation. “If you don’t have a strong storage foundation with great resiliency, great availability, great serviceability and great performance, your cloud or virtual infrastructure is going to be mediocre — and that’s a very generous term,” he stated.

Herzog went on to talk about the importance of cognitive infrastructure, applications and storage going forward. He said IBM’s cognitive storage can learn when data goes from hot to cold and move it around for you.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of VMworld 2016.

Photo by SiliconANGLE