With cloud and hyperconvergence providing a significant part of the discussions at this year’s EMC World conference, breaking past the hype and into the details of its implementation is one of the bigger draws for those attending the event’s presentations and networking.

Yanbing Li, senior VP and GM of VMware, Inc.’s Storage and Availability Business Unit, sat down with John Walls and Stu Miniman (@stu), cohosts of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, to talk about the fast rise of Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI) and what draws customers to it, along with a number of other topics.

‘Year of HCI’

Early in the conversation, Li emphasized the link between software and hardware, making clear that even as cloud, Software as a Service and several other high-hype utilities are making software hot, hardware needs to retain focus as the foundation.

“I think even though we talk about software-defined, a lot of the software-defined is really fueled by hardware innovation, with flash becoming so high in capacity and so affordable in terms of economics,” Li said. “Suddenly, disruption is happening in a storage space, where you just put flash storage next to your server and you have a really capable solution for storage.”

Stemming from that, VMware’s Virtual SAN (or VSAN), which enables software-defined shared storage on VM platforms, was also on the table for discussion, as it has seen a similar high growth rate of interest over the past year.

Sales and storage

VMware’s aim is to retain a mutuality to vending HCI solutions, instead of an exclusive approach, Li said, though the company will also keep active in the appliance-space market. “We do believe that HCI is going to be a very high-gross market segment … and we’re putting new investment in that space. And in the HCI investment, we’re also taking a fundamentally different approach from any other vendors out there.”

The company has identified some particular events that tend to spark HCI adoption for enterprises, Li added.

“The typical sales trigger is when customers are looking for some sort of hardware refresh. Whether they’re refreshing their storage environment, whether they’re looking at refreshing their server environment, or they’re doing both,” she said. “The other type of trigger for a customer looking at VSAN is when they face storage challenges, whether it’s a scaling challenge or a performance challenge. … Today, the most frequently requested use-case for VSAN is business-critical use-case in the data-center.”

As customers have the option to start with just a few nodes, and expand that presence over time, Li feels that HCI has tremendous growth potential.

“We’re very excited to see that move to the customer believing in the value of hyperconverge and using that to a vast majority of data-center workload. … It’s gone from just a niche set of use-cases [to] now going fairly broad.”

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