The world has changed since the days of the old datacenter. Now, companies are moving their storage and compute to the cloud. However, most companies see little need to throw everything into the cloud at once. Rather, they find it prudent to migrate a small step at a time as applications and storage needs require, according to Ron Bianchini, president and chief executive officer at Avere Systems Inc., a data storage company

“What we enable people to do is take baby steps, move a little bit of capacity to the cloud,” Bianchini said, explaining how his company helps businesses move to the cloud.

He spoke to Stu Miniman (@stu), co-host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile live streaming studio, at SiliconANGLE’s Palo Alto, CA, studio.

Compute, storage and CAP

“Think about the world in 2008; people were trying to get flash in the datacenter,” Bianchini said. He then related how Avere came up with a storage system that knew about two types of storage: expensive, high-performance flash and cheap, long-latency spinning disk. With this system, they showed high-performance applications could be run at a low cost.

“A solution that knows how to use local flash and store big bulk data is an ideal solution for the cloud,” he said.

A company can keep their storage on-premises while their compute lives in the cloud, or they can take the opposite approach and keep their compute in the office while the cloud handles storage. Either way, Avere helps customers take baby steps to slowly adopt the cloud, Bianchini said.

He then mentioned a term, CAP, which stands for Capacity, Availability and Partitioning tolerance. No system can be great at all three, so vendors must focus on two, he said. Google’s file storage solution, for example, offers availability and partition tolerance, but enterprise often needs high consistency. That’s where Avere solutions come in.

“We talk about cloud as if it’s already happened, but we’re only on the cusp of what’s possible,” Bianchini said. The real next phase is adoption, migrating applications and storage into the cloud.

“There’s no doubt that in the future world, all data, all applications will be in the cloud,” he said.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of Google Cloud Next 2017. (*Disclosure: Some segments on SiliconANGLE Media’s theCUBE are sponsored. Sponsors have no editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE