The amount of data being generated each year on a global basis demands an agile, intelligent approach to infrastructure in order to manage it.

During the March 30 “Data-Driven Begins With Intelligent Infrastructure” event, industry analysts and Hitachi Vantara executives and partners held a real-world discussion on leading trends for infrastructure modernization. They also analyzed key actions that IT leaders can take to build a secure, intelligent hybrid cloud data platform. (* Disclosure below.)

Here are three insights you might have missed:

1. Converged private cloud can help redefine scalability. Here’s how Rabobank did it.

Customers of financial institutions expect their services to be available online 24/7 with absolutely no downtime. This means a bank’s IT infrastructure must be up to the task.

Banking and financial services company Rabobank maintains a vast range of applications and databases to meet the needs of  millions of customers in 39 countries. The bank had previously relied on a mix of virtual and physical servers, but it wanted to move more virtual machines into a converged private cloud architecture built by Hitachi Vantara.

Rabobank adopted an automated private cloud approach, as the number of virtual machines quickly expanded from 2,000 to 21,600. An enriched application programming interface made it possible for Rabobank to provision any combination of storage and compute resources on VMware or physical servers with just a few clicks. It is just one example of the flexibility that storage vendors can provide in a software-defined model.

“It’s core to our business, but one particular innovating aspect here is that this includes a true scale-out software-defined version based on a common code base,” said Dan McConnell, senior vice president of product management, enterprise infrastructure at Hitachi Vantara, in an interview with theCUBE. “This is a software-defined storage based on our industry-proven traditional code stack that enables common management and common data services across mid-range enterprise and software defined, either on-premises or cloud hosted.”

Here’s theCUBE’s complete interview with Dan McConnell:

2. New IT consumption models are streamlining delivery of infrastructure services.

The move toward storage as a service is part of a trend to make data center resources more cloud-like and enable migration to hybrid cloud.

Storage as-a-service allows organizations to scale up and down based on business needs. Consumption-based pricing that accompanies this model can often be an attraction, but one of the major reasons for as-a-service adoption involves an ability to manage unpredictable resource usage with greater ease and agility.

This becomes particularly important in the deployment of new applications, as described in theCUBE’s interview with Kevin Purcell, head of global strategic partnerships at Hitachi Vantara, and Giorgio Vanzini, vice president and global head of partners and alliances at DXC Technology Co. The relationship between the two companies illustrates how new consumption models are generating interest in IT organizations that must quickly adapt to changing infrastructure needs.

“Many of the as-a-service offerings that Giorgio was talking about actually require no commitment up front,” Purcell said. “That’s a really new way of doing business together. What we’re looking to do is provide flexibility to our joint customers. As they need more infrastructure, we provide it. When they need less, we provide less.”

Here’s theCUBE’s complete interview with Kevin Purcell and Giorgio Vanzini:

3. Modern cloud-native workloads are driving change in data-driven architectures.

In his interview with theCUBE, Ashish Nadkarni, group vice president and general manager of infrastructure systems, platforms and technologies and BuyerView Research at IDC Research Inc., noted that he had recently attended an industry event to talk with company executives about data infrastructure in the data management market.

What Nadkarni learned was that the modern cloud-native workloads, built to take full advantage of the cloud computing model, were having a significant impact on an organization’s view of IT infrastructure. Nadkarni was a previous contributor to an IDC research report published last year that provided an in-depth examination of cloud-native workloads in the modern enterprise.

Workloads are becoming bespoke, carrying unique requirements for compute within the IT environment. Being future-ready now means being able to build a forward thinking infrastructure that can accommodate modern cloud-native workloads while updating existing ones.

“Workloads are changing,” Nadkarni said. “It’s not your traditional business workloads, but also modern cloud-native workloads. It requires that not just the infrastructure be modern and agile, but also the consumption of it.”

Here’s theCUBE’s complete interview with Ashish Nadkarni:

Workloads are also leading some businesses to shift entire IT operations across data center and multicloud to one cloud operating model. Such is the case of Atos SE, a European multinational IT and consulting services company, which is partnering with Hitachi Vantara to provision IoT applications, deliver SAP HANA as a managed service and enable insights from video intelligence.

“The continuum around cloud isn’t just around supporting core data centers, but of course the movement to hyperscalers’ public cloud, maybe sovereign cloud in the future,” said Adam Lewis (pictured), global chief technology officer of the tech foundations business at Atos, in an interview with theCUBE. “Edge clouds, as well, mean that we need to do things differently. We need to be able to service our customers in a consistent way, giving them consistent experience wherever their workloads may sit, being able to deliver them a consistent set of operations while still delivering on those service levels that they’ve known for years.”

Here is theCUBE’s complete interview with Adam Lewis:

And make sure to watch theCUBE’s complete coverage of the “Data-Driven Starts With Intelligent Infrastructure” event here:

(* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the “Data-Driven Starts With Intelligent Infrastructure” event. Neither Hitachi Vantara LLC, the sponsor for theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE