IBM’s Erik Eyberg Says Benefits of SVC Outweigh the Overhead
Eric Eyberg, the head of strategy and business development for IBM’s FlashSystems group, stopped by theCube at Edge 2013 to explain why the benefits of using SAN Volume Controller (SVC) in FlashSystem environments justify the added overhead.
Flash solutions typically compromise on functionality in favor of performance, but that’s not the case with IBM’s offering. According to Eyberg, SVC provides users with enterprise IT capabilities – including snapshots, deduplication, compression and replication – for the relatively low ‘cost’ of a 100 millisecond delay. In his view, that’s a good trade.
TheCube host Dave Vellante asks how FlashSystem matches up to other all-flash arrays in terms of performance. The executive replies that the platform is ahead of the competition, a lead which he credits to the technology IBM obtained through the acquisition of Texas Memory Systems earlier this year.
“What TMS did for over 30 years was design this purpose-built piece of hardware totally [focused] around performance, reliability, and efficiency,” he elaborates. “Then you layer on the software, and the software brings IBM yet another advantage because we have this time-tested, proven, feature-complete SVC stack that has been in mainstream enterprise deployments for years. And we have this great integration … so you get the hardware part, you get the software part, and it’s all integrated together in nice packages.”
Eyeberg says that IBM offers FlashSystem users a choice between single-level cell (SLC) flash, which is generally found in high-end commercial systems, and the cheaper multi-level cell (MLC) variant. He notes that the latter type usually proves to be the more cost efficient option because traditional enterprise applications are not as write-intensive as the data-driven workloads SLC flash is designed to handle.
Click the video below to watch the full interview.
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