Victor Laurel, Archutech, at HP Discover Barcelona 2013 with Dave Vellante Traveling all the way to Spain for the HP Discover event, theCUBE team mingled with over 10,000 attendees and is broadcasting live from Fira Barcelona GranVia, providing viewers with ongoing and insightful interviews from top executives and analysts. First on the agenda was Victor Laurel, Director of Strategic Architecture with the recently rebranded Archutech, who talked in-depth with host Dave Vellante about being a service integrator transitioning to a service provider and the many challenges the company faced during that process. Over the past couple of years, Archutech as a service integrator has helped its clients solve a bevy of problems they faced. For instance, there were companies who had their own solutions, but weren't working very well. Talking about their modus operandi, Laurel explained: "We take a look at their solution, storage, services and goals and we find a great solution for them." The trend they've come to see over and over during the last couple of years was that things tend to become too big to be easily manageable. Hence, "the transition to a service provider was quite natural; after seeing the same problem over and over again, we wanted to provide our own solution. We've taken all the lessons learned from our customers and provided the solution in the form of a cloud service." Wanting to get the info right, Vellante summarized: "So you are transitioning from a service provider that would do high touch to a cloud service provider, focused on infrastructure as a service. Where are you in that transition?" he asked next. "We've built up the solution platform, and over the past couple of years we've done our research on different kinds of technologies, and there's always the same three parts: network, servers and storage," Laurel clarified. "About 16 months ago, building the cloud, we looked at all those individual pieces, and the biggest one we found was storage. "Storage is the largest part of your enterprise infrastructure and it's also the largest cost," explained Laurel. "Storage has a number of factors in it, but you always want it to be fast, highly mobile, easy to expand, and easy to maintain. Traditional enterprise architectures basically involve large storage chassis, large disks, fiber channel -- and we found out those were too bloated." The challenge with a virtual server infrastructure was keeping it very flexible and fast, and having a storage that can keep up with it all. "After a lot of research we found a simple solution: you have to virtualize your storage as well," said Laurel. @thecube #hpdiscover