Many companies are aware that the data they own could return dividends if they’d learn to churn insights from it. But many aren’t used to thinking of data as a commodity that requires economical storing, handling, slicing and dicing. Choosing smart technology for storing and backing up data can save a lot of space and costs.

“The most valuable asset isn’t gold; it’s not silver; it’s absolutely not oil; it’s not diamonds. It is data,” said Eric Herzog (pictured), chief marketing officer and vice president of worldwide storage channels at IBM Storage Systems. “And it doesn’t matter whether you’re one of the largest banks in the world, you’re in manufacturing, you’re in the government, or whether your Herzog’s Bar and Grill — the data is your most valuable asset.”

There are certain tricks — like doing test and development with backup copies and switching from flash to hard drive as needed — that can help companies juice the most value from data on the cheap.

Herzog spoke with Dave Vellante (@dvellante) and Lisa Martin (@LuccaZara), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the VMworld conference in Las Vegas, Nevada. They discussed data economics and IBM’s big, fat, diverse storage portfolio. (* Disclosure below.)

Re-purposing and blowing hot and cold

Instead of making “27,000 copies” of data for a bunch of different uses, it’s much wiser to use the same copy for multiple purposes. “When you backup the data, or you snapshot or replicate the data, you’ve now created a secondary copy. Well, what if you could use it to do tests? What if you could use it to do big data analytics? What if you could use it for DevOps?” Herzog asked. IBM’s Spectrum Protect Plus’ modern data protection enables users to do just this, he added.

Artificial intelligence-based data tiering can intelligently shuffle data from different storage homes depending on whether it’s hot, i.e, in high demand, or cold, Herzog explained.

“We can tier from anything to anything,” he said. For example, users can tier Spectrum Scale clustered file system to IBM Cloud Object Storage.

“When it’s hot, it will pull the data back into flash, for example. When it’s cold, it will put it to a cloud, it will put it out to a tape, or it will put it out to slow hard drives,” he said. This allows customers to manage capital expenditure and operational expenditure, he concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the VMworld conference. (* Disclosure: IBM Corp. sponsored this segment, with additional broadcast sponsorship from VMware Inc. IBM, VMware, and other sponsors do not have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE