While cloud and traditional storage are being pitted against each other by some data mangers, others are finding ways to bring the two formats together to leverage them into more efficient systems for both.

During the last day of IBM’s Edge 2016 event, Bina Hallman, VP of Software-Defined Storage Solutions at IBM, and Ken Barth, CEO of Catalogic Software Inc., sat down with Dave Vellante (@dvellante), cohost of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, to talk about several aspects of storage and data management that IBM and Catalogic are hoping to improve through their partnership.

Clearing storage clutter

Both guests were enthusiastic about the event and its attendees. “For storage, this is a fantastic event for us,” Hallman said.

Barth concurred: “We couldn’t ask for a more well-schooled crowd that really understands the issues of copy-data management, and it’s just been an exciting place to be.”

As the conversation continued into the problems they were hoping to solve, the idea of poorly managed storage expansion, or storage creep, was pulled into the light as a main target. “Storage creep is a problem that clients have these days, especially around copy-data,” Hallman explained.

And according to Barth, “What we saw a couple of years ago, in Catalogic, is we saw this evolvement into … this is gonna be like the third wave in data protection. The more you can begin to manage your snapshots or copies, really, it can be that next wave and become a more efficient way to restore applications, a more efficient way to run business processes … and really a more efficient way that can really drive capex and opex savings,” Barth added.

Uniting for speed

“The way I look at it, if you take flash, flash storage can save people a ton of time in terms of efficiency and make things faster. But if you add a copy-data management platform to it, particularly our ECX [Instant Copy Data Management Platform] … then really you have a geometric savings of both capex and opex, because you can start creating efficiencies, not only identifying unused storage [and redundant snapshots, but also improving insights],” Barth stated.

He continued to explain: “When you marry the storage to our copy-data management platform, the storage now becomes an integral part of the application delivery, the transaction delivery, whatever they’re trying to do.”

And as these tools create flexibility within the data, they’re also looking to create access flexibility. “When there’s data in the cloud, data on-prem, clients have the need to be able to get a visibility, they need to have a view of their entire environment, instead of managing this in silos, to really be efficient with that management and have the seamless flow of data to and from the cloud. So there’s a very key tie to hybrid environments here,” Hallman shared.

The focus then moved to the ability to enact policy management through platforms such as Catalogic’s self-serve ECX model, something which Barth placed in high regard. “I would tell you that any company that has 90 developers needs this,” he said.

Hallman shared the high hopes for possibilities opened by this approach: “For us, this solution enables us to help clients solve that problem [of data management], and I think you’ll see the adoption of it increasing more and more, because the problem will continue to get worse if left on its own.”

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

Photo by SiliconANGLE