Change is good, but only in measured doses and for well-defined goals. At least, in the world of enterprise storage arrays where the latest is rarely the greatest, according to Randy Arseneau (pictured, left), chief marketing officer of Infinidat Inc.

“We never shy away from the concept of general purpose storage. That became very unfashionable about five or six years ago when everything had to be hyperspecialized and fit for purpose,” Arseneau said. However, the benefit of being general is limitless flexibility; this is indispensable for large businesses with a huge variety of workloads, he explained.

Arseneau joined Brian Carmody (pictured, right), chief technical officer of Infinidat, during a recent interview at the VMworld conference in Las Vegas, Nevada. They spoke with Stu Miniman (@stu), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio. (* Disclosure below.)

Infinidat storage solutions hybridize all-flash with more traditional methods to cover the whole gamut of workloads, Carmody pointed out, adding that companies that go all in with a single software-defined flash solution soon discover its limits. VMware Inc.’s software-defined storage system vSAN is a case in point, he stated.

“What we’re hearing — especially on Wall Street —  is that it’s vSCAM, not vSAN,” Carmody said. The reason? Its failure to scale leads to an explosion in server costs, according to Arseneau.

“What every customer — without exception — sees is that they add $3 in server cost for every dollar in storage array cost avoidance,” Arseneau said.

Marketers falling over NVMe over fabric

The next big disappointment for customers may be the heavily hyped Non-Volatile Memory Express, or NVMe, over fabric storage, according to Carmody. While NVMe has huge potential, it’s not for all use cases, he said.

“I think that it’s not being used correctly by the marketers that are running a lot of the storage companies.” he said. “They’re using it as a way to make storage expensive.”

This is the opposite of Infinidat’s strategy, which is much more in sync with customer goals, Carmody stated. And that is to continually reduce storage costs.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of VMworld 2017. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for VMworld 2017. Neither VMware Inc. nor Infinidat Inc. have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE