In this interview from Microsoft Ignite, Rachna Lalwani, senior consultant product manager at Dell Technologies, and Karl Rautenstrauch, principal partner enablement program manager for Azure Storage at Microsoft, join theCUBE’s Rob Strechay to discuss the evolution of seamless file storage in the cloud. Lalwani and Rautenstrauch detail the strategic depth of the Dell-Microsoft partnership, highlighting how PowerScale for Azure goes beyond a traditional "lift and shift" to offer a fully native cloud experience. The discussion covers the operational benefits of deep integration, including unified billing, monitoring and a single point of support provided by Dell. They also break down the flexibility offered to customers through two distinct deployment models: a customer-managed solution for granular control and a newly previewed Dell-managed service designed to streamline maintenance and allow IT teams to focus on innovation.

The conversation then shifts to practical applications, exploring how organizations in data-intensive industries like media, EDA and life sciences are leveraging the solution for high-throughput, low-latency workloads. Lalwani and Rautenstrauch emphasize the critical role of storage in the AI era, explaining how hybrid mobility allows businesses to bring data directly to Azure’s GPUs for model training without re-architecting applications. Furthermore, the group discusses how this "best of both worlds" approach future-proofs infrastructure by combining the elasticity of the cloud with the familiarity of the OneFS operating system, ensuring operational consistency across on-premises and cloud environments.