Ranga Rangachari, Vice President and General Manager of Storage at Red Hat, appeared in theCUBE to speak with co-hosts John Furrier and Stu Miniman, during the Red Hat Summit 2014 taking place this week in San Francisco.

“Storage is a subsystem of the OS, but in the context of cloud, it’s a huge conversation,” said Furrier, who invited Rangachari to elaborate on the way storage fits into the software-defined data center and into the cloud.

“What gets me excited at this summit is the continuous innovation,” said Ranga Rangachari. “With storage, we saw a pronounced shift during the last couple of years, and that happened for a number of reasons:

1. the movement in the cloud – you cannot take a piece of storage hardware and move it in the public cloud; it defies the laws of physics. That necessitated the need for a software-defined approach to storage.

2. the other aspect is a new type of workloads. Unstructured data – industry analysts expect that over the next five years 90 percent of enterprise data to be unstructured in nature. Unstructured data requires a different type of treatment. It is no more scale-up, it’s scale-out, so you got to continue to deal with the volume and the velocity of the data that’s coming in.

Those are the two trends that we see,” answered Rangachari.

“Nowadays data has become central to the value proposition. It’s part of the development but also part of the OS,” noted Furrier. What is, in your view, the software-defined storage?” he asked.

“It’s the ability to truly decouple the services that the software layer can provide,” answered Rangachari. “The intelligence elevates to the software level and the ultimate goal is you should be able to take industry standard commodity X86 servers which have a tremendous horse power built into it and layer in your software solution on top and have all the services that you’ve been providing: data replication, data backup, data migration, so the entire gamut of services that you’re used to. With customers, it gives them complete flexibility and freedom of choice. Really, it’s about separating the hardware and the software. Computers are becoming software-defined, so the triple play here is software-defined storage, compute and networking.”

Watch Ranga Rangachari’s interview below, as he talks about the service provider market and some relevant use-cases.