While many tech companies have touted the benefits of flash drives over hard drives for a while now — they’re faster, smaller, more energy efficient and shock-proof — they were also much more expensive. However, like all things in technology, prices have declined over time, and so flash is becoming much more attractive to organizations of all sizes.

“I think we’ve seen different waves of flash. The first one, in 2012, was the performance wave; a small number of applications that needed that performance,” said Vish Mulchand, senior director of product management and marketing at Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co.

Mulchand said he now thinks we are in Wave 2 of flash, or the affordability wave, and we’re on the cusp of Wave 3. He believes the considerations of Wave 3 will be the acceleration of applications (storage, compute, network); simplification; risk management; and investments. How do companies invest into the IT asset that they’re purchasing, and how does it stay fresh over time?

Mulchand and Inge Kjølsvik, head of infrastructure at Varner Gruppen AS, recently joined Dave Vellante (@dvellante) and Paul Gillin (@pgillin), co-hosts of theCUBE*, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, during HPE Discover EU, held in London. (*Disclosure below) They discussed flash advantages in the world of retail, as well as the appeal of its simplicity for organizations.

Flash as a fit for retail

Varner Gruppen is a Norway-based retail fashion company, with 1,600 stores in northern Europe. Its concerns are common ones in retail; it wants to retain customer loyalty, it wants to give customers the information they need, and it wants its employees and customers to have fast response times on apps and in stores.

“The main reason for us to go to flash is that the amount of data is growing; we have more than 1 million items that we want to do big data analytics behind,” said Kjølsvik. He also explained that speed on in-store apps is very important, as store employees need instant responses to take care of retail customers in the shop. As a retailer, the company also maintains huge picture libraries, and it needs the performance so that customers can access them.

The appealing simplicity of flash

Mulchand explained that flash is simpler because “it just works. There isn’t a need to constantly change, tweak, respond to spikes; flash takes that all away.”

He said that, because of fewer worries with flash, his company’s customers are able to concentrate on their own core businesses rather than being concerned with drives.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of HPE Discover EU. (*Disclosure: HPE and other companies sponsor some HPE Discover EU segments on SiliconANGLE Media’s theCUBE. Neither HPE nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo by SiliconANGLE