It’s difficult to think of a single area in IT that has in the past two years progressed the way that storage has. Increasing speeds, all-flash arrays and Non-Volatile Memory Express have ratcheted storage to unprecedented levels of performance. However, it is still challenging for enterprises to choose among the storage types available, especially as they move to cloud and confront new density and latency snafus.

At the Infinidat Waltham Ribbon Cutting in October, theCUBE spoke Infinidat Inc.’s  CTO, Brian Carmody, about how all this innovation will culminate. Carmody told Stu Miniman (@stu), co-host of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, that businesses are increasingly moving storage heavy workloads to the cloud.

“All of this is putting a lot of pressure on systems designers to really focus on density of storage and density of computation,” Carmody said. “We see that this is contributing to the rise of a new class of storage technologies called hyper-storage systems, which are designed to meet those goals,” he furthered, adding that Infinidat and others are hotly pursuing this innovation as the ultimate achievement in storage.

Carmody outlined the pros and cons of the currently existing storage systems. Monolithic racks tend to not be dense enough, packing less than a petabyte; these are being superseded by all-flash arrays, which offer higher density due to built-in data reduction technology. SDS and the server storage offer a middle way with lower density but also lower cost than all-flash.

Hyper-storage, in a way that is almost too good to be true, offers the best of all of these, according to Carmody. “It is storage technology that has the reliability of monoliths; it has the cost structure, the programmability and the ability to run on any type of hardware that the SDS systems have. But it has the density and the data center profile of the hyper-scaler storage,” he explained.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of the Infinidat Waltham Ribbon Cutting.

Photo by SiliconANGLE