Application workloads are shifting requirements in storage, and companies like Hewlett-Packard Co. are innovating to help keep up with the trends. Craig Nunes, VP of marketing at HP Storage, sat down with Dave Vellante and John Furrier on theCUBE, from the SilconANGLE Media team, at VMworld 2015 to talk about storage trends.

Shifting storage requirements

Agility and storage used to not be in the same sentence, and so part of what’s going on in storage innovation is to help bring the same agility into storage that’s seen on the server side.

“[Agility is] very much a theme now in the DevOps world, and it’s gone mainstream,” said Nunes. “IT is going to become a utility, and only those with scale … [will have] the scale to power it at the lowest possible cost. Folks are in various stages of moving there.”

Unpredictable workloads

HP Storage’s platform 3PAR is built for massive server consolidation. Storage will always go through unpredictable workloads, and the platform simply has to be able to respond in this day and age. Containers are also adding another level to the storage question.

“The platform really has to handle those unpredictable workloads and deliver a predictable quality of service,” said Nunes. Respond time must be flat, and so the infrastructure has to change. “Everything has got to be automated, template-based,” he said.

Great innovations always get re-innovated

“Great innovations really get kind of re-innovated a couple of times before they go mainstream,” said Nunes. He sees this really happening with flash. “People started to think, ‘I could bring this into my infrastructure if only I could bring greater Tier 1-capable data services.’” People then started innovating with flash, and it’s now driving toward an all-flash data center.

Watch the full interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of VMworld 2015.

Photo by SiliconANGLE