Once upon a time, data storage was simple. Choose a media: Disk or tape? Data was close enough to be delivered on-demand, and firewalls shielded the perimeter, keeping everything safe and secure.

Then came cloud. Breaking free of the constraints of solid storage, data roamed wild. On-premises, in the cloud, or on the edge; it turned into a nebulous beast that needed tracking and taming. Security nightmares grew, and controlling data became a costly concern.

“You’ve got data that’s being produced at the edge, you’ve got point of sales systems, you’ve got autonomous vehicles, you’ve got data that’s being produced on the cloud itself, and you’ve got data that’s being produced at the core,” said Sundip Arora (pictured), director of North America storage and big data solutions at Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co.

Arora spoke with Dave Vallante (@dvellante), host of theCUBE, at theCUBE’s studio in Boston, Massachusetts, to discuss trends and changes in storage and HPE’s presence in the space (see the full interview with transcript here). (* Disclosure below.)

Automated data management

HPE’s cloud operating model centers around bringing the company’s intelligent data platform to the customer. “What we are talking about is not just the automation of bringing that data in, but also how that data is being utilized. And to us, the way we map that challenge is through intelligence,” Arora stated.

Mapping the cloud operating model HPE-style means providing customers with three things: cost efficiency, ease of use, and resource optimization.

Cost efficiency through the HPE GreenLake flexible infrastructure service gives customers “the ability to use and consume data on demand, consume compute on demand, across the entire portfolio of HPE products,” Arora stated.

Ease of use through HPE InfoSight platform allows businesses to utilize artificial intelligence for their hybrid clouds. “InfoSight is a product that uses deep learning and machine learning algorithms to look at a wide net of call-home data from physical resources, then takes that data and make it actionable,” Arora said. According to HPE statistics, InfoSight lowers IT operational expenses 79%, cuts trouble tickets by 73%, and lowers mean time to repair by 69%. InfoSight also has a guaranteed 99.99% uptime.

InfoSight is being expanded across the entire suite of HPE products, according to Arora, who describes the platform as “automation AI glue.”

Next up is resource optimization through application aware storage. “It’s about applying the right performance level to the right set of applications,” Arora stated.

Understanding which application is creating the data gives knowledge of how the data needs to be accessed, which indicates where the data needs to reside. HPE Composable Fabric creates a single layer between on-premises and cloud resources that allows fluidity of data movement according to application and user needs.

“We want [our customers] to have optimization across both [on-prem and cloud-based] models,” Arora said. “In the future, the idea is to bring [everything] together where the automation and the orchestration allows customers not to worry about what product they’re using, but more about what are the requirements of the application.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s CUBE Conversations. (* Disclosure: Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither HPE nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE