In the new “Wild West” of big data — encompassing the Internet of Things, cognitive business and cloud — storage has morphed from a boring box that resides in a data center to the new star of the data show, capable of gleaning analytics and vast business-critical insights from the data on hand.

Having been in the storage business for years, IBM Corp. has seen many fads come and go. “In storage, every few years, a startup comes and addresses one problem really well and creates a whole storage solution around that,” said Chandra Mukhyala (pictured), offering manager for IBM Storage at IBM. While that may solve one problem in storage, it will miss crucial areas of storage that enterprises must have to stay ahead in this big data world, he explained.

Mukhyala joined Dave Vellante (@dvellante), co-host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile live streaming studio, during the DataWorks Summit 2017 EU in Munich, Germany. They discussed IBM’s Hadoop support, as well as the status of enterprise storage. (*Disclosure below.)

Different ways to solve storage issues

For its customers, IBM has been supporting a Hadoop connector on its Spectrum Scale offering, which allows Hadoop customers to run straight on it, Mukhyala stated.

“If you look at Hadoop distributions, one of the first questions [customers ask], ‘Is this supported by my distribution?’” said Mukhyala. To provide customers with more confidence in their storage solutions, IBM formed a partnership with Hortonworks Inc. that certifies Spectrum Scale.

Regarding different solutions for storage, Mukhyala pointed out that it’s probably okay, for example, a search engine company to look to commodity components to make up its storage solution, because they’re running analytics and nothing else. However, for large commercial enterprises, it is not about just analyzing one data function from one business function, it’s about pooling all of the data and finding the correlations and the insights. For that, enterprise storage is needed, he added.

In addition to providing data sharing across many other applications, enterprise storage also delivers data management features, including data governance, encryption, auditing and retention.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of DataWorks Summit 2017 EU. (*Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner at DataWorks. Neither conference sponsor Hortonworks nor IBM, sponsor of this segment, has editorial oversight of content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE