Not too long ago, floppy disks could handle the vast majority of storage needs. But now, the incoming waves of data from not just computers — but also electronic devices, apps, internet refrigerators, sensors, smart TVs and so on — need to be loaded, stored, processed and analyzed in a timely fashion.

“If you think about it, the workloads of today are vastly different than the workloads of the past,” said Ravi Pendekanti (pictured, right), senior vice president of server solutions product management and marketing at Dell EMC. “Today, people are not looking for data to be just collected. Data … doesn’t give you anything other than just lots of bits and bytes. What really gives you the power to act upon [something] is information.”

Pendekanti and  Steve Fingerhut (pictured, left), senior vice president and general manager of the Storage Product Business Unit at Toshiba America Electronics Components Inc., joined Paul Gillin (@pgillin) and John Furrier (@furrier), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile live streaming studio, during Dell EMC World in Las Vegas, Nevada. (* Disclosure below.)

In addition to talking about how to handle big data, they also discussed the particulars of Solid State Drives.

Storage strategies in a big data world

Pendekanti said that the need for better performance paired with higher capacity is driving companies like Dell EMC and Toshiba to continue to continuously innovate, especially around SSDs. Toshiba recently announced its latest generation 512Gb NAND wafer, with 64-layer, 3D flash.

Data will reside on hard drives for long-term storage, but it will be brought onto an SSD tier for very rapid analytics work, Pendekanti explained.

“Each individual die on the wafer doubles in capacity; it will soon do it again and again. This 3D technology really allows us to drive density, and that means lower cost, more capacity,” Fingerhut said.

He also commented that this year is the crossover where enterprise SSDs will consume a higher amount of the spend than enterprise hard drives. It’s all about the intelligent use of flash; it’s fast, it’s reliable, it consumes less power, he added. However, it is more expensive, so it’s a matter of choosing the right applications and the right methods of deployment.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s independent editorial coverage of Dell EMC World 2017. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for Dell EMC World. Neither Dell nor other sponsors have editorial influence on content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE