The road to the hybrid cloud is anything but straight for many enterprise firms. Twists, turns and forks in the road can range from security and disaster recovery to automated services and workload management.

The hybrid cloud evolution has also translated into a solid business opportunity for firms such as GreenPages Technology Solutions, a systems integrator and cloud services company, which has partnered for many years with Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co. to help integrate hybrid technology solutions across the data center stack.

It’s a process that often involves working with clients who would prefer to make that necessary and final hardware investment once and for all. They just need a roadmap to show them the way.

“Among the people we’re talking to, we hear some people say this is the last major hardware purchase they want to make,” said Tim Ferris (pictured), solutions architect at GreenPages. “That’s debatable, but people want to have a roadmap to move their infrastructure to cloud or cloud services. So, helping our customers manage that hybrid cloud journey is a big part of what GreenPages does.”

Ferris spoke with Dave Vellante (@dvellante), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, at theCUBE’s studio in Boston, Massachusetts, during two separate interviews. They discussed how GreenPages leverages a wide range of HPE solutions to assist customers and the importance of placing a value on disaster recovery services for any business today (see the full interviews from both videos with transcripts here and here). (* Disclosure below.)

Watch the first interview with Tim Ferris below:

Nimble dials back complexity

There was a time when the enterprise storage industry catered to a desire for plenty of options and customized solutions. The hardware came with lots of “knobs and dials” to engineer features such as increased performance for a redundant array of independent disks, or RAID storage.

Then HPE opened a new landscape with its acquisition of Nimble Storage Inc. in 2017 in a move to simplify the information technology world through intelligent, self-managing flash storage in the data center and cloud.

“People appreciated that level of detail, but they wanted it easier,” Ferris said. “I’m seeing a move toward less customization and more ready, set and forget-it arrays. With HPE’s acquisition of Nimble, they’ve taken that operational complexity down significantly.”

A key component in helping make the hybrid infrastructure easier to manage is an artificial-intelligence tool such as InfoSight, which was originally developed by Nimble. Two years ago, HPE launched InfoSight on its 3Par storage platform, and a key byproduct has now become environmental awareness, helping IT administrators tune and manage a hybrid environment.

“The Level One and Level Two support that users get through the predictive analytics of InfoSight are critical to customers,” Ferris said. “A lot of customers don’t have time for full-time storage administrators anymore.”

Watch the second interview with Tim Ferris below:

Valuing disaster recovery

A lot of customers can’t afford significant downtime either, yet this remains a troubling possibility for any IT organization. Cyberattacks or natural disasters, such as a hurricane, can suddenly bring a firm’s disaster recovery strategy into sharp focus.

The key to an effective disaster recovery strategy is to know the value of downtime to a business, according to Ferris.

“A good business should value how much downtime or loss of data will cost the business and then use that to determine what they need to spend on disaster recovery in order to make sure that doesn’t happen,” Ferris explained. “For our retail customers, their hurricane season is Black Friday and beyond. They want to make sure they have a solid solution because a minute of downtime can mean thousands and thousands of dollars of lost revenue.”

Be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s CUBE Conversations. (* Disclosure: Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co. and GreenPages Technology Solutions sponsored this segment of theCUBE. HPE, GreenPages, or other sponsors do not have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE