If storage is boring, then Microsoft Corp. Chief Executive Officer Satya Nadella hasn’t gotten the memo. The company has been beefing up its data storage portfolio through acquisitions and new product offerings.

Whether it’s Azure Blob storage with the expandable capacity for hundreds to billions of objects in hot or cool archive tiers, to the recently acquired Avere Systems Inc. for maximizing storage performance in the hybrid cloud, the company has been giving the enterprise storage field new life.

“[Avere] is really aimed at high-performance compute environments like we see in genomics and media entertainment,” said Karl Rautenstrauch (pictured), senior program manager of Azure Storage at Microsoft. “We all joke that storage is boring … but honestly it’s one of the most interesting and fastest-growing platforms in Azure.”

Rautenstrauch spoke with Dave Vellante (@dvellante) and Stu Miniman (@stu), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, at the VeeamOn event in Chicago. They discussed data protection in the public or private cloud and how Microsoft positions its customer offerings to avoid concerns about vendor lock-in. (* Disclosure below.)

Protection in public or private cloud

An extension of Microsoft’s partnership with Veeam Software Inc. is focused on data protection, an important consideration whether the data resides in a public or private cloud. In September, Veeam announced an agreement with Microsoft to extend data protection capabilities to the Azure Stack.

“Veeam is able to protect Azure public assets in the same way that they’re able to protect Azure private,” Rautenstrauch said.

Despite holding a significant position in the public cloud marketplace, Microsoft is careful about its positioning with customers from the standpoint of vendor lock-in. “We try to promote the use of containers extensively for customers who have that concern,” Rautenstrauch explained. “We also make sure to provide those portable cross-cloud platforms like Postgres and MySQL. We don’t want that lock-in to be there.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the VeeamOn event. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for VeeamOn 2018. Neither Veeam Software Inc., the event sponsor, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE