With the disruptive effects of cloud technology spreading across many facets of business operations, the impact felt by the data storage market is hard to ignore, particularly with the concomitant changes driven by the easily programmed flash memory solutions. And though the push for the latest things is a standard refrain, the storage companies are also examining how to build on and adapt the legacy architectures that have been around long enough to entrench themselves in standard IT operations.

“Enduring technologies actually can transition across architectural and technology boundaries,” said Bill Philbin (pictured), senior vice president and general manager for storage and big data segment solutions at Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co.

Philbin joined Stu Miniman (@stu) and Dave Vellante (@dvellante), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during this year’s VeeamOn event in New Orleans, Louisiana. They discussed the importance of partnerships, the current state of the storage market and how HPE is leveraging some of its relevant holdings in that area. (* Disclosure below.)

The storage business has been experiencing some dramatic changes lately, and while it is debatable whether those were self-inflicted or natural changes, Philbin felt that it was something the market had brought upon itself, with business model changes centering on hardware picked out as a key cause.

The days of simply selling more spinning disks had been good ones for manufacturers and vendors alike, according to Philbin, but the new state of things has prompted some significant changes for both. On that note, 3PAR Inc., an HPE’s acquisitions, is outstripping other storage solutions in performance and sales through its use of flash, he added.

With flash and efforts to optimize deployment times becoming more prevalent, “compression at a company level” is a field of growing importance,” Philbin said. Also, HPE’s SimpliVity hyperconverged infrastructure also provides flexibility and individuality of choice businesses demand, he added.

Data weight and enduring partnerships

While migrations of computing tasks to the cloud are one thing, “The thing that doesn’t move all that well is data, and data has gravity,” Philbin said, pointing to the ability to move data along with the compute side as one of HPE’s big differentiators.

Philbin laid out some of HPE’s other solutions holdings as well, touching on how they compared with those of its partners and competitors. “We have our own data protection technology with Data Protector, we have our own sort of snapshot-management capability with RMC [Recovery Manager Central], and the question is, how do we sort of protect the entire environment?” Philbin asked.

Philbin also made clear that HPE is allied with Veeam Software inc. primarily for the sake of customers who depend on it. “There are people who prefer to use Veeam, and we have to support that. … We have other partnerships that customers have made a preference around, that we’re not going to convince them to do something different,” he concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of VeeamOn 2017. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for VeeamOn 2017. Neither Veeam Software Inc. nor other sponsors have editorial influence on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE