Karim Abdullah, IT Operations Director, Technolgy Services at Sprint, discussed his company’s recent SVC implementation as well as software defined trends with theCube co-hosts Dave Vellante and Stu Miniman, live at the IBM Edge 2013 conference.

Explaining Sprint’s choice of SVC, Abdullah said it had been a matter determined by costs and the need to replace end of the line components in their storage arrays. “As we rolled the virtualization platform up, we eliminated the end of line storage arrays.” In this migration, SVC brought lower costs for what would have been a very pricey propositions two years ago.

The cost of storage migration

Exploring the costs and issues yielded by such a storage infrastructure migration, Abdullah said “it’s timing, it’s leasing, it’s renewal, what’s not mentioned is it’s disrupting to applications availability.” Sprint uses flash systems in their storage infrastructure – VMAX running behind SCV. “Our SVC has four layers of storage right now” and has reduced the number of interventions to manage the storage. Asked if he sees those four tiers collapsing over time, he said that “maybe they will be reducing to three from where they are today.” He was not over confident about having flash systems replace tier 1.

Asked what advice he’d give to those thinking of virtualization layers and software defined storage, Abdullah recommended to make sure they “understand the footprint you’re operating,” how you can modify it and where. “You have to understand where you are and what modifications you need to get” where you want. Virtualization is a great way of automating storage and reducing manual operations.

Asked about the overhead in SVC as a major concern, Abdullah said “that was not a big factor, cause we were going from an end of life system to something that was automatic and able to move faster. For the most part we ignored the issue.”

Commenting on software defined networking, Abdullah explained that “you’re trying to get to the next platform that gives you more flexibility, more mobility and more usage.” As the end users, general users move and expected demands grow, you have to move your capacity accordingly.

Mobility is one of the key drivers because the mobile user is now driving greater consumption and usage than network.

Commenting on what SDN vendors need to improve to convince buyers, Abdullah mentioined “things around security, access points, enabling the hardcore infrastructure.”

“We’re looking at some open software, we’re looking at any and every available avenue” to get the best results, Abdullah explained. The main challenge the company faces is how to respond fast, before the customer gets frustrated. That is why they require flexible, agile solutions, but also “you want to be very secure in your solution.”