Hold those brand new, all-in-public-cloud, microservices-based horses. Leaving the on-premises data center doesn’t necessitate a full 180 for all infrastructure and applications. There’s a long hybrid arch in between for enterprises that must carry on business while modernizing.

Smaller, enterprise-ready cloud platforms are luring some companies off the all-hyperscaler route. Many companies today eventually face a reality check that goes something like this: “I need to go to cloud, [however], I really can’t just take my apps and lift and shift and go there,” said John White (pictured, right), chief innovation officer of Expedient Inc. 

For these companies, a cloud platform that feels more like home would be a wiser move, according to White. Familiar technologies and built-in compliance with industry standards allow them to quickly resume business as usual, he added.   

White and Lynn Lucas (pictured, left), chief marketing officer of Cohesity Inc., spoke with Stu Miniman (@stu), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, and Justin Warren (@jpwarren), chief analyst at PivotNine Pty Ltd., during the VMworld event in San Francisco. They discussed the technologies Expedient chose to perfect its Enterprise Cloud platform (see the full interview with transcript here). (* Disclosure below.)

Old-world VMs meet new-world consumption pricing

Expedient leverages the same VMware Inc. virtual machines that most enterprises already use. It upgraded its infrastructure with new data-management and scale-out Network Attached Storage from Cohesity. The scaling capacity of Cohesity’s NAS platform is incomparable, according to White. Expedient now has 2.6 billion images on the platform — a number growing 30% annually.

Cohesity’s software-defined solutions allow customers like Expedient flexibility in how and where they consume the technology, Lucas explained. In fact, this flexibility rolls forward to service providers’ customers that may be all over the hybrid map.

“Is it in the hyperscaler? Is it [a collocation center] somewhere? Is it your own cloud? That’s part of the advantage [of an all-in-one solution] — you can give your customers some flexibility, as well as to how they want to consume the service,” Lucas said. 

Cohesity’s platform allows Expedient to provide the consumption-based pricing customers expect from cloud, according to White.

“We decided as a service provider, we actually want to give that benefit back to the customer. So when somebody buys data storage from us on the data protection [platform], they buy what they’re actually consuming on the disks. So you could have 100 terabytes in all of your VMs; if you only need one terabyte, that’s all you’re buying from us,” White concluded. 

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

Photo: SiliconANGLE