Cost is going to be a major discussion item across the cloud world over the near future, according to cloud infrastructure executives specializing in data management, storage and optimization.

“It’s going to be a huge topic,” said Kevin McGrath (pictured right), vice president and general manager at automation cloud optimizer Spot by NetApp Inc. He was referring to upcoming keynotes at AWS re:Invent, but was implying that this ticket item is, or was about to be, at the top of general cloud-adopter discussion themes overall.

McGrath and Ronen Schwartz (pictured left), senior vice president and general manager for Cloud Volumes at NetApp, spoke with theCUBE industry analysts John Furrier and Savannah Peterson at the recent AWS re:Invent conference, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed the fiscal challenges facing adopters of cloud as business transitions from traditional environments. (* Disclosure below.)

Cost-effective handling

Price performance is superseding straightforward latency as a principal performance measure descriptor, according to Schwartz, who drilled down on McGrath’s theme.

“How much am I paying for the performance that I need?” Schwartz asked.

The two think that this question is becoming crucially important, because as massive amounts of data are getting generated, it becomes increasingly relevant in terms of cost.

‘The more data you have, the more you need to handle, the more critical for you is to handle it in a cost-effective way,” Schwartz said. “With the scale of data performance to handle massive amounts of data, it is becoming more and more critical.”

“Dollar for performance” should be the tagline differentiator in choosing storage, the cloud storage executive said. Expanding this premise, he pointed out that performance overall is important because it’s a key influencer of the user experience. Performance, too, becomes critical at scale.

“How much are you spending? How far are your dollars going? How are you using the cloud to the best of your abilities?” McGrath asked.

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

Photo: SiliconANGLE