It’s one thing to store some data. It’s another to store a lot of data. Then, there’s storing so much data people invented new words for it. As the digital revolution rides through the business world, more data than ever is being collected and processed. The Internet of Things (IoT) represents the potential, and the nightmare infrastructure requirements, of this new world.

To gain some insight on large-scale data storage, Dave Vellante (@dvellante), cohost of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, joined Phil Bullinger, SVP of the Isilon Product Line at EMC, during the EMC World 2016 conference in Las Vegas.

A growing business

The conversation opened with a look at Isilon as a company and with EMC. There’s a growing momentum in the business, Bullinger said. While the company grew on its own, the acquisition accelerated that growth. EMC pulled the product into a lot of different use cases and markets. “The average capacity of one of our clusters is close to a petabyte. There’s no other file system on the planet that can match it,” Bullinger said.

“Our value proposition is a single file system that can span a vast amount of data, yet is simple to manage and upgrade,” he added. The explosive growth of data being produced and collected makes this more important than ever.

Use cases for a data lake

It’s hard to put Isilon in a single box, Bullinger said. The business is split between customers buying for performance on workload-dominated tasks and those who buy it for capacity. Performance is always a concern, but it’s raw capacity that earns their business. Isilon really drove the phrase “data lake,” according to Bullinger. By pulling storage together, a company gains in efficiency and saves money.

IoT is an enormous opportunity, he added, and companies are discovering how to gain value from unstructured data at large scale. With the growth of IoT, Bullinger said he didn’t see an end to it.

Be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of EMC World 2016.

Photo by SiliconANGLE