Midrange storage systems remain a significant part of every enterprise computing strategy, especially in current markets driven by digital data assets. So even while software was eating the world, hardware must manage to keep up. Today’s customer expects a storage appliance to do more than just house data.

“Especially in the midrange, our customers expect the system to do everything,” said Sean Kinney (pictured), senior director of product marketing at Dell EMC. “It has to do everything well. It doesn’t get to be specialized — because for a lot of our customers, it is the IT infrastructure; it is that data capital, which is the lifeblood of their business.”

Dell EMC has consistently been one of the largest suppliers of enterprise storage, Kinney added.

Kinney spoke with Rebecca Knight (@knightrm) and Stu Miniman (@stu), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the Dell Technologies World event in Las Vegas. They discussed midrange storage customer demands and how Dell EMC is responding (see the full interview with transcript here). (* Disclosure below.)

Compromise nothing

This ability to do everything is a key aspect of the midrange storage market, according to Kinney. While in the past, a new product could eventually get baked into a feature in the storage market, one-pony shows in midrange storage just aren’t feasible anymore.

“Because it has to do everything … one feature isn’t really going to break through anymore,” Kinney said. “The architectures, the intelligence, the reliability, the resiliency that takes years of hardening — the new competitor has to start at ground zero all over again.”

Another key driver is user experience. The friendlier the better, according to Kinney. To meet customer demands, Dell EMC recently launched Dell EMC Unity XT, a reimagined midrange storage system with unified storage speed and efficiency for multicloud environments. Such versatility requires focused efforts from Dell EMC engineers.

“In a lot of cases, our competitors and other platforms have to make compromises,” Kinney stated. “They say, ‘OK, if you want performance, turn this function off.’ It was that challenge that our engineers took on, and that’s when we came up with no-compromise midrange storage — and that’s Unity XT.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the Dell Technologies World 2019 event. (* Disclosure: Dell Technologies Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Dell nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE