The hybrid cloud environment is here to stay, and on-premises data centers remain an important option for businesses despite changes in the storage market. To fulfill its function, however, local storage needs some key capabilities, especially when dealing with petabyte-scale demands.

“One thing that has changed the on-prem data center is the fact that its core operating characteristics have to take on kind of that public cloud characteristic,” said Phil Bullinger (pictured, right), chief executive officer of the enterprise data storage Infinidat Inc. “It has to be a transparent, seamless scalability. I think the days of CIOs even tolerating people showing up in their data centers with disk trays under their arms to add capacity is over.”

Bullinger and Lee Caswell (pictured, left), vice president of marketing, CPBU, at VMware Inc., spoke with Dave Vellante, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, for a digital CUBE Conversation. They discussed the future of on-prem data centers, the reasons for corporate interest on local storage, and how Infinidat and VMware have been strengthening their partnership in this market. (*Disclosure below.)

Massive consolidation is the way

Along with continuous scalability, a fundamental feature for an effective on-prem data center is nonstop operation. And for that, massive workload consolidation is essential.

“[It] is clearly the play for [total cost of ownership] and efficiency,” Bullinger said. “They don’t want to have any compromises between scale and availability and performance.”

What has also proved to be important are flexible economic models, especially in times of crisis, such as the one caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.

“Flexible economic models, everybody takes this for granted. But you really have to be completely flexible between the two rails: the capex rail and the opex rail and every step in between,” Bullinger stated.

Data sovereignty drives investments

Despite the shifts on data center architectures over time, on-prem storage is still significant to most enterprises, Bullinger pointed out. A major reason is that data sovereignty is among the top priorities for companies.

“The control of the security, the ability to recover quickly from ransomware attacks, etc., these are the things that are just fundamentally important to the business continuity and enterprise risk management plan for these companies,” he explained.

Infinidat’s main partner, the cloud computing and virtualization company VMware agrees.

“We’re seeing that the on-prem investment is not stalling at all because of data sovereignty because of bandwidth limitations and because of really the economics of what it means to rent versus buy,” Caswell said. “So, partnering with leaders in storage is a core part of our strategy going forward.”

VMware bets on a highly distributed hybrid cloud architecture.

“And one of the things that we’re doing with Infinidat … is we’re showing how customers can invest intelligently and responsibly on-prem and have bridges across the hybrid cloud,” Caswell stated.

The almost 10-year alliance between the two companies has been advancing to keep up with the movement of customers, which has been using more and more different types of applications. One of the latest news is that Infinidat has integrated VMware Momentum for Virtual Volumes (vVols). Therefore, in large-scale environments, it is now possible with Infinidat to manage hundreds of thousands of vVols across multiple hosts. This enormous scale makes Infinidat attractive to some of VMware’s largest customers.

“Particularly with the vVols integration at scale, that we just haven’t seen before, Infinidat has set the bar and is really setting a new record for that,” Caswell concluded.

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

Photo: SiliconANGLE