For all of the businesses finding new ways of using cloud technologies and services, whether public, private or hybrid, someone has to put that infrastructure into place. And companies that can handle all three forms are quickly gaining an edge in the market.

At EMC World 2016, Navin Sharma, lead product manager of ScaleIO at EMC, joined John Walls and Stu Miniman (@stu), cohosts of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, to discuss a few of the ways in which ScaleIO differentiates itself from similar services, what customers want and how providers are reacting.

Flexibility is key

Sharma laid out some of the advantages of ScaleIO right from the start, explaining, “ScaleIO was born as a software-only technology, so what this gives us is tremendous flexibility in terms of the hardware consumption model.”

He quickly moved on to how customers receive this flexibility, but noted that adoption was often governed more by the internal politics of a company than strict benefit evaluation, saying, “What we see with our customers is that roughly half of them go to a storage two-layer mode, and the other half stay with hyperconverged. … It’s really got to do more with internal processes and operations than the technology itself.”

From small start to giant operations

While the struggle to get in the door is one thing, ScaleIO has little trouble proving its value once that entrance is made. Sharma touched on how customer needs are specifically addressed by the service. “What we hear about is … when you have compute and storage in the same block, as you’re scaling up, you may have applications that have more compute than storage, and vice versa, so that definitely plays a role. But one of the great things about ScaleIO is we can actually kind of circumvent that, because there’s nothing keeping customers from mixing modes. … You can actually add in just the storage portion without the compute, and that works totally fine.”

He expanded on this by outlining how ScaleIO could be picked up by enterprises at a low quantity for their initial needs and easily expanded as the company grew its needs. “You can just add another node if you ever need more capacity or more performance, and architecturally, inherently, it’s not dependent on any kind of hardware control anywhere in the data path. … If you really want a true private cloud, where you want to be like the Amazons of the world, the Googles of the world, you start with three nodes and you keep adding nodes and you keep the agility.”

The flexibility and options provided with this framework were core to the ScaleIO experience, Sharma felt. “At the end of the day, it’s really about customer choice, and we see that as something we’re going to carry on as long as ScaleIO’s around.”

Watch the full interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of EMC World 2016.

Photo by SiliconANGLE