Most companies are likely in the process of moving certain workloads from on-premises to cloud. But virtual reality tracking company Ultraleap Ltd. had the opposite problem.

The company is on the cutting edge of haptic technology, marketing a product that allows extended reality users to feel virtual sensations in mid-air. And as it started to scale, Ultraleap was concerned about ceding control to outside software-as-a-service products.

“We had quite a disparate architecture … not as hybrid as we would like, and not as much on-premise as we would have liked,” said Richard Goodwin (pictured, right), group director of IT at Ultraleap. “We needed that scalability and also the whole operating expenses versus capital expenditures, and also not being driven by lots of SaaS products and architecture and infrastructure where we needed to be in control because of our development cycles and our product development.”

Goodwin and Avishek Kumar (pictured, left), director of product management, Storage Division, at Dell Technologies Inc., spoke with Dave Vellante, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, for a digital CUBE Conversation on why Ultraleap chose PowerStore. (* Disclosure below.)

Less is more, thanks to Dell PowerStore

Ultraleap now hosts its own servers and storage arrays on-prem, but it didn’t take a technological leap backward to get there. It was a step forward to greater efficiency and cost savings, thanks in part to Dell EMC PowerStore scalable all-flash storage.

Dell was selected over the competitors because of PowerStore’s advances in deduplication and compression, according to Goodwin. Not to mention Dell’s 4:1 data reduction guarantee.

“What was excellent was that Dell was so confident that they did not even review our data types prior [to contract] and they were willing to stand by that guarantee of 4:1,” Goodwin stated.

Goodwin admitted that when looking for a storage vendor, Ultraleap was “in quite a difficult situation where we’d pretty much gone off of a cliff in terms of input/output performance.” This meant that once a vendor was selected, deployment needed to be fast. Dell came through: Within three weeks of placing its order, Ultraleap had the PowerStore array in its server rack and had begun migration.

Ultraleap achieves 9:1 data reduction

PowerStore has made managing data simpler, cheaper and more effective, according to Goodwin. With the data reduction, Ultraleap was hoping to hit Dell’s promised 4:1 ratio, possibly even 5:1. But results kept ramping up slowly, and now “we’ve actually hit 9:1, which is significant,” Goodwin stated.

The company’s lead storage engineer has estimated 40% less time is now spent in data management, freeing up engineers to focus on the cutting-edge innovations with machine learning that are making Ultraleap a leader in virtual reality tracking.

In addition, Ultraleap reports a 400% speed of improvement of publishing, 18 % faster code coverage, and 1,300% quicker firmware builds.

“We wanted best-of-breed and best-of-set, and that was done,” Goodwin said. “Because of what we’re trying to do with our hybrid model and repatriate some of the data as it were from the cloud,  we needed that ability to, with ease, be able to scale up and scale out. And the PowerStore gave us that.”

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

Photo: SiliconANGLE