Coupling diverse applications with appropriate storage can be a drama-filled matchmaking game. There’s always a better, faster storage product debuting to tempt customers away from the tried and true. But the performance of all-flash or cloud storage may not justify the cost for some apps.

How can companies get their storage straight for legacy and modern apps in hybrid and multicloud environments?

They can do it by not obsessing over every nanosecond-faster, software-defined storage upgrade; by realizing that “disk” is not a dirty word; and by focusing squarely on cost-to-performance ratio, according to Doc D’Errico (pictured), chief marketing officer of Infinidat Ltd.

“Math is greater than media,” D’Errico said.

Some companies may strive to adopt the fastest, most-advanced storage products as soon as they come out. These ostensible upgrades are hard to keep up with. Spinning disk was once called the greatest performance improvement possible. Later, the industry considered flash to be the pinnacle of performance; now we see that it was just one step in an ongoing evolution.

Storage manufacturers began focusing on raising the speed of the interconnect; now non-volatile memory express is supposed to be the answer to all performance issues under the sun. Or is it storage class memory, or SCM? Some vendors are gunning for even greater speeds, putting dynamic random-access memory in the servers.

Should companies run this race alongside the storage industry?

D’Errico spoke with Dave Vellante (@dvellante), co-host of theCUBE, at SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio in Boston, Massachusetts. (* Disclosure below.)

Don’t throw out disk with the Drano

The bottom line is that the game is always changing, and there’s not much point in real-world companies trying to keep up, according to D’Errico.

“I guarantee you, whatever you do from the media perspective … by the time you get your application’s migrated, configured and running with business value, it’s already obsolete. Some vendor’s got something better coming out,” he said.

These technologies are great for some applications. But for others, the best overall solution may be something older and cheaper; it may even be spinning disk. Infinidat wants to take the confusion out of storage shopping for diverse apps with its all-in-one solutions. Its InfiniBox platform combines cheap, reliable spinning disk with newer, faster technologies like DRAM, which are orders of magnitude faster than flash, according to D’Errico.

“Our cache ratios are unparalleled in the industry,” he said.

Infinidat stays abreast of storage upgrades that actually improve cost-to-performance ratios. For example, “If SCM becomes more stable and becomes more cost effective, we can replace that SSD layer with SCM,” he said.

Elastic Data Fabric for multicloud

To enable even greater flexibility in hybrid cloud and multicloud, Infinidat recently announced its Scale to Win storage vision for the multi-petabyte data center. It encompasses a number of new offerings, including Elastic Data Fabric. This makes the migrating workloads among different systems, data centers, and cloud storage environments seamless. It enables a storage platform that evolves and flexes along with companies’ hybrid and multicloud strategies. And it makes data migrations a thing of the past.

Some companies may be surprised that when they add up the data in all of their apps, they total a petabyte or more, D’Errico pointed out.

Infinidat’s customers include a large number of cloud service providers, along with enterprises. It has grown about 33% over the last year, according to D’Errico.

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

Photo: SiliconANGLE