Karim Abdullah, the IT Ops Director for Sprint Nextel’s Technology Services unit, told Wikibon’s Vellante that his company had several good reasons to implement IBM’s flash technology in its data centers.

Sprint operates 121 call centers worldwide, but up until recently the company struggled with storage-side performance issues, and had difficulties providing adequate support as a result. Abdullah says that the deployment of IBM FlashSystems not only eliminated this problem, but also earned Sprint a spot among the most consumer-aware companies in the industry. The carrier identified a direct correlation between the flash-driven performance boost and improved operator response times.

Abdullah says that the main factor that swayed Sprint to jump on the flash bandwagon now rather than 2-3 years earlier is pricing.  Solid-state used to be considerably more expansive than traditional solutions, but IBM’s solution is priced at $11-12 per gigabyte – the cost of regular tier 1 storage.

Sprint is using IBM’s Storage Volume Controller to manage its storage environment, including tier 0, 1, 2 and 3. Abdullah doesn’t believe flash will collapse tier 1 because data retention laws require carriers to hold onto their data – and make it easily accessible – for fairly long periods of time.

Abdullah wraps up the interview by detailing why his company decided to go with IBM’s Texas Memory Systems-based appliance: it’s easier to deploy than competing offerings, it’s interoperable, and it’s efficient. The latter factor is especially important because the Department of Energy called for Sprint to lower its power consumption, an obligation that flash has made easier to fulfill.

See Abdullah’s entire segment below: