It was not that long ago when information technology systems managers had a quandary: where to store all the corporate data they possessed without breaking departmental budgets for the year. Today, where to store information is no longer the issue, as costs dropped and storage capacity zoomed. Instead, the new dilemma is how to protect the data and move it quickly as needed while dealing with huge datasets and a lot of questions about their value.

Enter Igneous Systems Inc., a Seattle-based company named for long-lived volcanic rocks commonly found in the Pacific Northwest. Its technology is designed to provide the scale benefits of public cloud storage while sitting behind the enterprise firewall.

“We’re talking about people who have petabytes of data, billions of files, spread across hundreds of systems. What we are doing is backup, archive and discovery of massive files inside the enterprise,” said Kiran Bhageshpur (pictured), chief executive officer of Igneous Systems.

Bhageshpur, who previously worked at EMC Corp.’s Isilon Storage division, spoke with Stu Miniman (@stu), host of theCUBE, at SiliconANGLE Media’s theCUBE studio in Palo Alto, California. They discussed the Igneous storage as a service model, challenges in moving large amounts of data between enterprise platforms, and growth in the hybrid computing world.

Part of data center needs no management

Igneous emerged from stealth mode one year ago and has focused on building its storage as a service model. Customers have no hardware or software to install. Aside from power and cooling, everything necessary is provided by Igneous.

“What’s not to like about infrastructure that’s inside your data center but you do not have to manage it at all?” Bhageshpur asked.

When the company was founded and its leaders began talking with potential customers, they gathered information about dataset size. Two years later, those datasets had already expanded 40 percent.

“The fundamental truth is that datasets are growing, every year it’s more. The challenge is getting data from where it lives to where it’s needed,” Bhageshpur said.

As data sets have grown to massive size, the discovery portion of storage service has become more important. Before data can be moved, IT managers and enterprise users need to know its value. Igneous backs up the data and then provides background information, such as who’s using it, how frequently it is being accessed or modified, and how it’s growing.

“This is the beginning of appropriately staging data on the right infrastructure,” Bhageshpur explained.

As companies increasingly move to a hybrid computing model, options become important when moving large amounts of data between different environments. “The service we run can run in the enterprise data center or in the public cloud or at the edge,” Bhageshpur stated. “Customers are looking to us to chart the journey from all on-premises to a true hybrid world where they can use cloud patterns much more effectively.”

Watch the full video interview below:

Photo: SiliconANGLE