At the Supermicro Open Storage Summit 2025, Cliff Madru of Iron Mountain, Mark Iskra of Intel, and Paul McLeod of Supermicro join theCUBE’s Rob Strechay to examine how cloud service providers (CSPs) are rethinking storage-as-a-service to meet the demands of hybrid, edge and cloud-native workloads. Madru details Iron Mountain’s Iron Cloud platform, designed for cyber-resilient, tiered storage with capabilities like air-gapped tape and AI-driven data value extraction. He explains the company’s five-step digital transformation journey, bridging physical and digital assets while reducing risk and optimizing total cost of ownership. Iskra outlines Intel’s role in enabling CSP scalability through open standards, high-density white box platforms, and silicon innovations such as PCIe Gen 5 with 136 lanes, MR-DIMMs and built-in accelerators for encryption, erasure coding and compression. He also discusses Intel’s contributions to open source, including Kubernetes I/O resource isolation to combat “noisy neighbor” performance issues. McLeod shares how Supermicro’s building-block architecture, global manufacturing and partner ecosystem accelerate CSP deployments. By offering optimized server configurations for block and object storage, direct liquid cooling for efficiency and integration with partners like Intel and Iron Mountain, Supermicro enables CSPs to build scalable, differentiated services without forklift upgrades. Together, the discussion highlights the interplay between hardware innovation, software-defined infrastructure and operational models that allow CSPs to monetize storage, improve resiliency and deliver flexible, secure services in a rapidly evolving digital landscape.