In pursuit of its mission to provide “fanatical customer service,” Rackspace, Inc. is helping customers innovate and find the best solutions for its storage and data management needs by partnering with companies like EMC, Brocade Communications Systems, Inc. and many others. Chris Wetzel, storage director for Rackspace, said in an interview with theCUBE during EMC World 2015 that he’s hearing a lot from customers this year about data lakes, flash and Big Data.

“When you have a large data footprint … being able to add compute to it is a huge value to customers,” he said. “[There are] not as many full-to-full adopters right now [but] a lot of conversations about how they’ll grow into it, which is the other thing we like about Isilon. You can start with a footprint and deliver file shares and whatever you need, and as your business grows you can add it, which is very, very powerful.”

Flash storage: a hot, new technology

Flash storage has become a hot, new technology, but Wetzel makes it clear that there’s no one-size-fits-all solution to storage. Even tapes can work for some applications, in a limited capacity. However, Wetzel pointed out, “As customers reach those limits, flash is a great answer for that. So we leverage the EMC partnership to help solve that for customers together. And when those make sense, we can deliver that for those customers.”

It can even be worth investing in flash or disk backups now with an eye toward using them for analytics a few years down the road rather than abandoning the data, but the best solutions still depend on which problems companies are trying to solve, whether it’s performance, cost, resiliency or innovation.

Scale remains a challenge

Scale, however, remains a challenge, especially in the data center space. “The nice thing for us is we don’t actually spend as much time talking with customers about our data center,” Wetzel said. “Whatever problems we’re trying to solve at scale — is it room level, data center level, campus level — those are the things we are designing for now.”

In fact, he goes so far as to say, “That’s the real challenge we have. Scale is just a mess.” But automation and simplification can speed that process up. “It’s a great problem to have that we’re going to be fighting for the next couple years.”

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