Legacy computing company NetApp Inc. may not be the first to come to mind for the latest in technology innovation, but its experience and faithful customer base allows it to leverage its way to the forefront of new markets. One of the areas where NetApp is looking to drive innovation is in the flash storage market, where its know-how in traditional storage systems is being applied to modern architectures.

“We’ve been in data management for 20 years, we just never talked about it that way,” said Mark Bregman (pictured right), NetApp senior vice president and chief technology officer.

Bregman and John Woodall (pictured left), vice president of engineering at full-service solutions integrator Integrated Archive Systems Inc., spoke with host John Furrier (@furrier) and guest host Keith Townsend (@CTOAdvisor) of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the recent NetApp Insight event in Las Vegas. They discussed NetApp’s strategy for innovation in the areas of flash storage and computing infrastructure. (* Disclosure below.)

Innovation in flash

NetApp’s innovative DNA pointed the company to flash storage as an area where it could demonstrate its ability to keep up with the times. Flash storage had already been a part of the company’s product portfolio at the time it acquired SolidFire a year and a half ago, but it was looking to modernize its storage management system, Bregman explained.

“The real reason we did that was to get into this more programmatic, scale out, API-driven model of administration of storage. And we’re having to do that in so many dimensions,” Bregman said. 

As late entrants in the flash market, the market had basically given up on NetApp as a solution, according to Bregman. But once it built its product at the flash storage layer, its existing customer base proved more important than the flash technology itself to gain market share.

“We leveraged all of the storage management which we’d already built over 20 years. And so now we’re suddenly out there with a very solid flash engine, but it’s supported by all the other capabilities, which makes it valuable to our customers,” Bregman said.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of NetApp Insight 2017. (* Disclosure: NetApp Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither NetApp nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE