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.
A message from John Furrier, co-founder of SiliconANGLE:
Support our mission to keep content open and free by engaging with theCUBE community. Join theCUBE’s Alumni Trust Network, where technology leaders connect, share intelligence and create opportunities.
- 15M+ viewers of theCUBE videos, powering conversations across AI, cloud, cybersecurity and more
- 11.4k+ theCUBE alumni — Connect with more than 11,400 tech and business leaders shaping the future through a unique trusted-based network.
About SiliconANGLE Media
SiliconANGLE Media is a recognized leader in digital media innovation, uniting breakthrough technology, strategic insights and real-time audience engagement. As the parent company of SiliconANGLE, theCUBE Network, theCUBE Research, CUBE365, theCUBE AI and theCUBE SuperStudios — with flagship locations in Silicon Valley and the New York Stock Exchange — SiliconANGLE Media operates at the intersection of media, technology and AI.
Founded by tech visionaries John Furrier and Dave Vellante, SiliconANGLE Media has built a dynamic ecosystem of industry-leading digital media brands that reach 15+ million elite tech professionals. Our new proprietary theCUBE AI Video Cloud is breaking ground in audience interaction, leveraging theCUBEai.com neural network to help technology companies make data-driven decisions and stay at the forefront of industry conversations.
