Presented with the three options of simpler, cheaper or better, and only two can be selected, which makes the most sense? Ask any information technology manager who is trying to decide the best model among a bewildering array of storage choices for on-premises or off-premises data centers, and they are likely to ask for the solution that gives them all three. That’s the challenge that cloud storage providers are increasingly confronting as they deal with enterprise computing demands.

“You’re seeing in the industry a variety of different approaches to storage,” said Vish Mulchand (pictured, right), senior director of product management at Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co. “All of these things are coming together and trying to respond to the needs of data and how you want to process that data.”

Mulchand visited the set of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE’s mobile livestreaming studio, and spoke with co-hosts John Furrier (@furrier) and Dave Vellante (@dvellante) at the VMworld conference in Las Vegas, Nevada. He was joined by Eric Burgener (pictured, left), research director at International Data Corp., and they discussed cost factors, HPE’s storage initiatives and the potential for VMware Inc.’s VVOLs (virtual volumes). (* Disclosure below.)

Cost is increasingly becoming a major focus for a range of storage options creates a more competitive environment. Some infrastructure vendors are advising moving from cloud to cloud, on-prem to off-prem, much as a homeowner might look for a less-expensive storage unit for household goods.

“That’s something that creates a more level playing field that will ultimately result in lower cost,” Burgener said.

Cost for in-house vs. public cloud

Another factor influencing infrastructure decisions is scale, as larger enterprises will sometimes move data back on-prem for less cost than they pay a public cloud provider.

“If I’m going to be maintaining a five petabyte data set over a 10-year period, and I know what my access patterns are, is it cheaper to put that in Amazon or is it cheaper for me to build an infrastructure in-house and maintain that?” Burgener described as a frequently-asked question.

Simplicity and an improved number of performance options are also influential in data storage decisions. HPE’s Cloud Bank lets users leverage low-cost external object storage on-prem or in the cloud. And Nimble Cloud Volumes (an HPE product) provides easier data movement between clouds “because it’s disaggregated from the different cloud providers,” Mulchand said.

Another potential tool for simpler storage is VVOLs, a VMware project to improve storage provisioning by enabling ease-of-use management in block-based environments.

“To be able to select [a task] at the application level and perform that operation, that’s very intuitive. It’s easy for a non-storage person to understand,” Burgener concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of VMworld 2017. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for VMworld 2017. Neither VMware Inc. nor Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co. have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE