UPDATED 13:48 EDT / APRIL 17 2013

The Storage Alchemist Talks Flash Innovation + Business Value [Exclusive]

Steve Kenniston, a Global Storage Efficiency Evangelist for IBM often referred to as the “Storage Alchemist” thanks to his widely read IT blog of the same title, provided his take on flash storage in a recent interview with Wikibon co-founder and chief analyst Dave Vellante.

Kenniston starts by going over a recent Twitter chat that IBM held during the FlashSystem launch event this week. He found it notable because a diverse group of analysts and representatives from Oracle, EMC, Fusion-io, et al participated in the discussion, and because there was consensus that the industry has reached the flash ‘tipping point’. The topics that were brought up reflected this stance: participants talked about things like market demand and the impact of the technology on their applications.

Further into the interview, Vellante asks Kenniston if the rapid adoption of flash compares with older trends such as data deduplication. He responds by saying that the two are fairly similar: flash, just like dedupe, introduced new opportunities to save money and increase operational efficiency. The difference between the two technologies is that flash is growing at a much faster rate than dedupe ever did early on because unlike the latter, it has the potential to generate tangible business value.

“The value that flash brings, not that the that the flash drive itself makes your corporation money, but the fact that I can drive better performance, lower the latency and again re-architect my applications to actually have the ability to build in new features that drive competitive advantage – that’s the real stepping stone, that’s the point.”

Vellante and Kenniston briefly discuss the flash M&A scene and his company’s recent acquisition of Texas Memory System before wrapping up the interview. Kenniston concludes by highlighting that flash is proving to be a major catalyst for software-led environments.

See the full interview below:


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