Whoever said you can’t teach an old hound new tricks failed to get the message out to NetApp Inc. The legacy storage provider is pivoting to software-defined storage and data management, and it wants to run with Silicon Valley’s freshly founded bulls.

It has not given up on serving long-time customers, but it throws the bulk of its weight into uncharted terrain, according to Octavian Tanase (pictured), senior vice president of data, ONTAP Software & Systems Group, at NetApp. “We are a product company; we are passionate about innovation. I believe that we are innovating with more pace than many of the startups in the space,” he said.

Part of NetApp’s plan is to repurpose storage for next-gen data management, analytics and security. Tanase spoke with Dave Vellante (@dvellante) and Lisa Martin (@LuccaZara), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, at the BigData SV event in San Jose, California. They discussed the hidden talents of advanced software-defined storage. (* Disclosure below.)

The devil’s in software-defined details

Digital transformation can be a confusing trek for companies — many of whom can’t determine a starting point amid their legacy information technology. “Nobody starts with a fresh slate, so we’re looking to help customers modernize their current infrastructure through storage,” Tanase stated.

NetApp is helping customers adopt disruptive technologies in seamless, non-disruptive ways within their businesses. Aside from warp speed, NetApp’s software-defined storage has multiple benefits over other types, according to Tanase. One of them is cost, especially when you figure analytics systems into the picture.

NetApp and IDC Corp. recently teamed up on a study to find out how businesses are performing data analytics. “What the analysis has shown is that deploying an analytics — a Hadoop or NoSQL type of solution — on top of NetApp is half the cost of DAS [direct access storage].”

The agility of the ONTAP data management with a single management console lends itself to ever more common hybrid environments, Tanase pointed out. It can be consumed either as a virtual machine or a service. “We’re able to offer some of the same rich data management capabilities, not only in the traditional data center, but in the cloud,” he concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the BigData SV event. (* Disclosure: NetApp Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither NetApp nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE