If data is the new oil, digital trust is the currency on which it’s traded.

Digital Realty Inc. caters to a wide base of hyperscalers and large enterprise customers that trust and rely on its centers for data exchange, colocation and interconnection solutions. Thus, the company has, in turn, looked to Dell Technologies Inc. for expertise in performance, compliance and efficiency.

Tony Bishop, senior vice president of enterprise, platform and solutions at Digital Realty, spoke with theCUBE industry analyst David Nicholson during the Dell Technologies World event, an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. As Bishop described Digital Realty as “one of the best-kept industry secrets,” the pair went on to discuss the expected impact of the Dell partnership in shaping the company’s future. (* Disclosure below.) [The following content has been condensed for clarity.]

What’s the connection with Dell? What are you guys doing with Dell?

Bishop: I think it’s going to be a marriage made in heaven in terms of the partnership. You think of Dell as the largest leading provider of critical IT infrastructure for companies around the world. They bring expertise in building the most relevant, performant and efficient infrastructure, combined with the largest most relevant full-spectrum capability provider of data center capacity. And together you create this integrated pre-engineered kind of experience where infrastructure can be delivered on demand to really unlock the opportunity that’s trapped in the world around data.

What are some of the trends and important things we need to be aware of as we move forward from a data center and IT perspective?

Bishop: What we’ve seen is an explosion in data being created, processed, aggregated, stored and then enriched. And it’s really around that, what we call the data creation life cycle, where what we’re seeing is that data then needs to be shared across many different devices, applications, systems, companies and users. That ends up creating this new type of workflow-driven world that’s very intelligent and is going to cause a radical explosion in all our eyes of needing more infrastructure, needing it faster, and requiring infrastructure as a service.

You mentioned infrastructure. Tell me about the kind of optimization, from a hardware standpoint, that you expect to see from Dell. 

Bishop: It’s hidden; most people don’t understand that engineering. But that’s the partnership, and what we’re excited about with Dell is you’re bringing all that critical expertise of supporting all those various types of use cases of infrastructure combinations and then adding the engineering understanding of how to build for the right performance, the right density, and optimal total cost of ownership (TCO). In addition, doing it in such a way that the physical layout of having things in proximity and in a contiguous space can then be the way to unlock the processing of data and connecting to others.

What do the opportunities look like out there from a Digital Realty point of view?

Bishop: The opportunity is huge because it’s not one platform; there are many platforms. No business exists today that doesn’t use many applications, doesn’t consume many different services both internally and externally, and doesn’t generate a ton of data that they may not even know where it is. And it continues to force a requirement that says, “I need to be able to connect to all those clouds,” which you can do at our platform, but you also need to be able to put infrastructure or the storage of data next to it and in between it.

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of Dell Tech World 2022:

(* Disclosure: Dell Technologies Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Dell nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE