The scramble is on to secure huge data streams inundating enterprises from new sources like sensors and the Internet of Things. While that prospect is challenging enough, a simpler logistic problem also looms: Where does a company store those gargantuan data sets?

“Everybody’s hitting this juncture, because the data’s growing faster than the [IT] budget,” said Steve Pao, CMO of Igneous Systems Inc. Pao said he sees companies struggle to get a handle on exploding data and told Stu Miniman (@stu), senior analyst at Wikibon and host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile live streaming studio. (*Disclosure below)

Pao explained that the trend with much of the fresh data flooding in is that it is not the relational or structured type; he said it’s from new applications that are logging sensor data.

Pao also said that data from sources like streaming video feeds, microscopy and others require changes to storage technology at a deep layer. “As we’re looking at these very, very different datasets, we’re looking at very, very different kinds of computing, and what that requires is a very, very different kind of infrastructure,” he said.

Pao thinks these new applications need a restful interaction with the storage layer — and that this is generally available in the public cloud.

He says that when dealing with the “capacity tier” of storage rather than the hot or flash tier, time to first bite is not paramount; what is most important in his view is capacity throughput. “That’s actually where restful semantics actually gets superior to Posix semantics — when you have very, very large unstructured datasets,” he explained.

To on-prem or to off-prem?

Pao explained that Igneous Systems offers this restful semantics model to customers on-premises and as a service. He said that customers may want these public cloud features on premises for a number of reasons. One is simplicity; another is to dodge the fee a public cloud provider may assess for storage access.

He also stated that compared to staying on prem, moving to public cloud may present compliance snafus. “There are a lot more hoops for folks to run through to ensure that they are compliant with their own internal policies,” he explained.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of Virtualization Technology Users Group Winter Warmer 2017. (*Disclosure: This segment is sponsored by Igneous Systems, which has no editorial influence on content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE. No other VTUG segments are sponsored.)

Photo by SiliconANGLE