In their onogoing coverage of IBM Edge 2013, John Furrier and Dave Vellante and John Furrier spoke with IBM Chief Technical Strategist, Storage, Clod Barrera. The three discussed flash, metadata (particularly in light of NSA concerns), and what Barrera believes is an important tech trend.

Barrera explains that when it comes to future applications of Flash, enterprise technologists are not the decision makers. Rather, consumer electronics technologists (the folks behind tablets and smartphones, for example) that decide the relevance of Flash.

Turning to topical news, Furrier asks for Barrera’s thoughts on meta data and policy based data management in light of the NSA revelations. Barrera notes that it is good and exciting that people are waking up to the existence of metadata. He also offers a basic overview of metadata and the fuzzy areas that make it unclear and to what extent privacy is violated through government data gathering. Barrera uses the metaphor of football game coverage. If a large sporting organization hosts football games every Sunday, it can collect video of every game, every play, from every camera angle. But, what is, perhaps more useful than the coverage itself, is the aiblity to annotate it to describe what happened with every blitz and tackle, for example. These annotations of video, constitute data about data, or metadata. And, in some instance, Barrera notes, “metadata can be significantly bigger in size than actual data.”

Policy concerning access to citizen data can be a complicated issue. In some instances, one aspect of our individual data may be private, while another may be less private. For example, the content of our phone conversations should be private, but data of who we call is more open as phone companies have access to this information.

Discussing the importance of software defined technology, Barrera explains, “I see homogeneous behavior across all my storage, I’m not constrained by the physicality of what the storage can do.” He suggests the next step is to create more bandwidth as well as provision capacity and performance through an API call.

Furrier concludes by asking Barrera what is “the one tech” he’s focusing ont that everyone should be looking towards. Barrera cites ObjectStore  as simple, easy to program and good for immediate demand as in when you want something on your phone, it can reach in and cover it quickly.