Storage-as-a-service is emerging as one of the most disruptive shifts in enterprise technology, replacing the rigid, capital-heavy storage stacks of the past with agile, on-demand models built for the artificial intelligence era. This isn’t just a cost play — it’s a reinvention of how organizations manage, secure and scale their data.

By fusing flexible consumption models with AI-driven optimization and performance-backed SLAs, today’s providers are giving businesses more than infrastructure — they’re offering a competitive edge. In a hybrid multicloud reality, this evolution means enterprises can adapt to fluctuating workloads, meet compliance demands and accelerate transformation with unprecedented speed, predictability and control, according to Cliff Madru (first row, right), vice president of Iron Cloud and data services at Iron Mountain Inc.

Supermicro and industry partners discuss modern enterprise storage needs with theCUBE.

“Storage plays a big part in making sure that your data is accessible, that it’s stored on the right tier, that you’re governing the information in the right way and leveraging best practices around how we protect that information,” Madru said. “Being able to unlock the power of some of that data [is also crucial], both bringing it to the right tier of storage and then, of course, being able to leverage the right tools within generative AI. There are some machine learning models that we’ve built to unlock value from, whether it’s digital documents or rich media files or whatever it might be that we help customers with.”

In a panel discussion, Madru was joined by Rex Manseau (first row, left), chief revenue officer of Lightbits Labs Inc.; Giorgio Regni (first row, middle), chief technical officer of Scality Inc.; Mark Iskra (second row, left), cloud solution architect at Intel Corp.; Marc Tanguay (second row, middle), senior product marketing manager at Western Digital Corp.; and Paul McLeod (second row, right), product director of storage systems at Super Micro Computer Inc. They spoke with theCUBE’s Rob Strechay at the Supermicro Open Storage Summit, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed how Supermicro, Western Digital, Iron Mountain, Scality, Lightbits Labs and Intel are each tackling a piece of the puzzle — together delivering the secure, scalable and intelligent storage-as-a-service ecosystems that modern enterprises demand. (* Disclosure below.)

Scality brings software-defined object storage at scale

An important element of the cost equation in enterprise storage is economies of scale. To efficiently drive those economies, Scality’s RING software enables petabyte-to-exabyte deployments with multi-tenancy, MFA and central management. The platform supports diverse workloads, with immutable backups, long-term archives and video streaming on a unified storage pool.

“You want to deploy one big pool of storage, which is Scality RING and then as many apps as you need go on top,” Regni said. “One of our customers is a bank. They have 2,000 applications because they tell their developers, ‘Use this service for whatever you need,’ and they just went at it. We have no idea of the traffic that’s coming. That creates some challenges for us, and it’s all about metadata scaling and being able to handle unpredictable traffic.”

For Iron Mountain, Scality powers a half-exabyte deployment across two U.S. data centers, with active replication and lifecycle management. Its architecture separates performance-facing connector layers from capacity-focused storage servers, enabling independent scaling and cost efficiency, Regni added.

Lightbit Labs evolves high-performance block storage

Lightbits Labs positions itself as a disruptor in block storage-as-a-service with its NVMe-over-TCP protocol. This software-defined approach delivers ultra-low-latency, high-throughput storage for databases and analytics — without proprietary hardware, according to Manseau.

“CSPs are different; they adopt things a lot faster — they have to,” he said. “You can draw a straight line between the underlying infrastructure and your end user customer’s experience and a straight line between that performance and your revenue stream. Competing with hyperscalers is tough. You can’t build typically at that scale with as many choices. Enabling you to do that, to establish a discrete high-performance block storage tier, can unlock new revenue streams, improve customer experience and enable you to take on a broader range of workloads.”

Lightbits enables CSPs to create high-performance tiers on commodity servers and Ethernet, achieving up to 18 million IOPS and 5 petabytes per cluster. The multi-tenant architecture supports rapid adoption, seamless orchestration integration and new premium services that compete with hyperscalers while cutting costs, Manseau explained.

Driving storage-as-a-service with scalable, efficient and reliable solutions

Cloud service providers face diverse performance needs — from AI training’s extreme I/O demands to compliance-driven cold storage — and often prefer building customized solutions for differentiation. To facilitate those needs, Intel’s infrastructure backbone offers scalability, efficiency and tight security, according to Iskra.

“It’s extremely hard for service providers to increase the amount of power going into a rack, even when they want to do a tech refresh,” he said. “You have to engineer for the available power, and that brings in a whole new set of constraints in terms of the processors, the devices, the systems and even the networks that you’re going to deploy. They’re constrained by all these things: reliability, durability and the ability to keep things going for an eternity in some cases.”

More specifically, Intel supports CSPs and storage-as-a-service providers with high-density hardware in the form of its Xeon 6 (Granite Rapids) with up to 136 PCIe Gen 5 lanes for massive NVMe/NIC connectivity. Additionally, there’s also ecosystem enablement, spanning partnerships with vendors such as Scality and Lightbits, in addition to open-source initiatives to accelerate innovation, Iskra added.

Despite the pace of innovations in storage-as-a-service and storage formats, tape remains unmatched (in total cost of ownership) for archival storage. And while SSDs offer top speed for AI and caching, their high cost makes HDDs the backbone for up to 80% of data, delivering strong performance for warm workloads, according to Tanguay.

“There’s a common misperception that [tape storage] is dated or outdated performance and a slow technology and that’s just not the case at all,” he said. “At Western Digital, we work on rapid innovation, constantly innovating to not only increase the density and the capacity of hard drives, but also on making sure that the drive data is stored reliably on the hard drives on proven existing technologies.”

Supermicro’s building-block strategy lets CSPs fine-tune infrastructure for any workload — from blazing-fast block storage to massive object storage capacity. By pairing this flexibility with strong partnerships, the company helps customers keep pace with innovation, scale cost-effectively and deliver top-tier cloud services without compromise, according to McLeod.

“We really can deliver everything you need inside of a data center to do whatever kind of application, whether it’s cloud service provider or AI, large scale AI deployment,” he said.

Here’s a short clip from our interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the Supermicro Open Storage Summit:

(* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the Supermicro Open Storage Summit. Neither Super Micro Computer Inc., the sponsor of theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE