Last week, IBM introduced a new flash appliance and announced that it will invest one billion dollars in flash memory R&D.  It’s a big commitment for a technology that’s making waves in the datacenter, enabling countless configurations and new options in scalability. Wikibon co-founder and chief analyst Dave Vellante attended the company’s media event in New York and caught up with Laura Guio, the vice president of IBM’s storage business, to discuss the news.

Guio cuts right to the chase – she says that customers who have deployed IBM’s solutions in their environments have realized immediate benefits, not least of which is lower TCO. Vellante notes that flash is more expensive than disk, but she points out that reductions in floor space requirements and power consumption make up for that.

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Guio says that customers are implementing flash ‘behind’ SAN Volume Controller (SVC), IBM’s widely-used storage virtualization platform. She explains that this allows users to leverage flash as a part of their environment without committing to a larger purchase, which Big Blue hopes they’ll make after experiencing the advantages she listed for Vellante.

The product IBM wants customers to buy is its newly announced FlashSystem appliance, which is based on tech the company gained through the acquisition of Texas Memory Systems (TSM) last year.