The modern enterprise wants to collect data, as much data as possible. Where large data stores used to be seen as something you needed to dispose of, in this new era of Big Data value, companies are seeing data as an asset. The problem with all this is you need a place to store that data, and storage space is finite. So how do you keep increasing your storage without spending a lot of money adding more and driving your IT staff crazy with new system requirements?

Brian Biles, cofounder and CEO of Datrium, Inc., and Benjamin Craig,  CIO of Northrim Bank in Alaska, spoke to Stu Minman (@stu) and Marc Farley (@gofarley), host and guest host of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, during VMworld 2016.

During the interview, Craig said that banks are usually risk averse, so some may be surprised to know that he recently chose a young storage startup over big names to supply the bank’s storage. He the told theCUBE hosts about his experience with other storage providers. Basically, as the bank grew, it would need a new member or controller in order to scale out.

And then Craig came upon Datrium, which he now refers to as the “storage unicorn” the bank was looking for. “When we run out of capacity with Datrium’s solution, we literally can go out and get commoditized solid state drives, pop one more into our local storage and end up literally improving our performance by a magnifier. That’s huge,” he said.

Hosts and reads together at last

Biles talked about the technology that makes this possible. Datrium has increased host density and has a model where the reads never leave the hosts.

“We have customers doing fairly Big Data warehouse operations where the reads never leave the host. It’s all host, flash, latency. And they can go from an eight-hour job to a one-hour job,” he said.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of VMworld 2016.

Photo by SiliconANGLE