Brian Dougherty, chief data warehouse architect at CMA Consulting Services, joined Stu Miniman and Steve Chambers on theCUBE during EMC World 2015 to talk about enterprise-level data storage and the technology that makes it work.

The conversation started with the question of what brings Dougherty to EMC World. He replied that it was the new announcements that brought him to the show. In particular, he was impressed by the XtremIO hardware improvements. The mention of XtremIO set the tone for the rest of the interview.

The possibilities of flash storage

Dougherty then spoke about the benefits of XtremIO. He touched on how it allowed them to reduce its storage footprint, and how the team could configure and deploy it quickly. The simplicity of the system was a strong selling point.

“With XtremIO, all that complexity is abstracted away from you,” he said.

These benefits allowed his group to look at databases and storage in a new way. He explained that with XtremIO, the infrastructure was handled so they could look higher at the business, the physical design and the applications.

Beyond point solutions

Dougherty mentioned that it originally brought XtremIO on board to help solve specific issues, but that its performance has earned it an expanded role in the company’s data plans. The features of XtremIO have proved a definite value-add for its business, and the technology allows the company to do things they couldn’t before. In particular, he related that it used to take days for a certain deep scan of the data, but with XtremIO the scan flew by in an hour.

“Now what we’re looking at is putting XtremIO in as an infrastructure storage layer,” he said.

The interview wrapped up with a concern about pushback from traditional operations people. Dougherty acknowledged that was an issue, but XtremIO was so easy to use that the resistance went away. “It really looks like our old storage array but performs a lot better,” he said.

Watch the full interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of EMC World 2015.