As enterprises amass huge data sets for analytics, insights and ultimately profits, two tricky problems might bob to the surface. First, traditional storage is not well equipped to handle gargantuan data. The obvious solution would be to move it to the cloud, which brings up the second problem: Some organizations with massive data sets want or need to keep them on-prem for a number of reasons. So how do they navigate these issues in a time when analysts advise that they need Big Data to enter the Digital Age?

Steve Pao, CMO at Igneous Systems, Inc., spoke about the problems jamming a ton of data into traditional storage may cause. He told John Furrier (@furrier), host of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, that he’s seen organizations with as many as 800 megabytes of data per second coming into their systems.

“We were working with an industry analyst who cited that in traditional enterprise storage, every petabyte of data that you manage, it turns out there’s always a hardware failure,” he said, adding that the number of disk drives becomes unmanageable as data grows.

The middle way

Pao said that Igneous Systems will be launching a solution on October 11 that seeks to give enterprises a handle on their growing data sets. “We’re not necessarily competitive with the cloud, but rather a really, really great complementary solution to the cloud where you can utilize cloud-like metaphors, cloud-like APIs. You can basically have the same tool chain that you use in the public cloud, but do so on-prem,” he said.

Some may think this sounds a lot like Oracle’s Cloud Machine. Pao’s contention is that Igneous is the better fit for the super-sized data market. “Really, really Big Data is not done in relational databases like Oracle,” he said.

Watch the complete video interview with Steve Pao below:

Photo by SiliconANGLE